


The Bridge of Souls

by Damkianna



Category: Veritas: The Quest
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Huddling For Warmth, Kidnapping, M/M, Magical Artifacts, Post-Canon, Soul Bond, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 11:23:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5454815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Damkianna/pseuds/Damkianna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Yeah, yeah, yeah," Nikko said, interrupting. "Don't go off alone, don't fall in any pits, don't touch anything that looks like it could kill you, don't touch anything that <em>doesn't</em> look like it could kill you because it probably could anyway." Post-finale trope bingo: Nikko and Cal get kidnapped, huddle for warmth, form a soulbond, and discover they're sort of into each other and also can maybe save the world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Bridge of Souls

**Author's Note:**

  * For [carolinecrane](https://archiveofourown.org/users/carolinecrane/gifts).



> My best effort to give you a gift worthy of everything you've given to so many small fandoms over the years, carolinecrane—so, doomed to failure, obviously, but I tried anyway! This story grew out of an effort to pack as many of your likes as possible into one Veritas fic without it getting incoherent, and that, at least, I hope I've succeeded at. :D Thank you so, so much for all your enthusiasm and tiny-fandom/rarepair love! This is ridiculous and tropey and full of clichés, but I hope you enjoy it anyway. ♥
> 
> All medical stuff, climbing stuff, and historical stuff is super handwaved, partly because this is about FEELINGS, not realism, and partly because Veritas. More info on the feeble research I _did_ do can be found in the endnotes. This is post-canon, but it blithely ignores the finale's implications re: Vincent. ~~TRUST VINCENT 2K15~~ There's also a fair amount of really fond Nikko &everybody, because TEAM FEELINGS YAY. Also, **minor warning** for violence. It's by no means graphic enough to warrant the Archive tag, and it's no worse than what happens to Nikko in 1.05 (Wheel of Dharma), but just FYI, it's there.

  


* * *

  


**PART I: DORNA**

  


* * *

  


"Yeah, yeah, yeah," Nikko said, interrupting. "Don't go off alone, don't fall in any pits, don't touch anything that looks like it could kill you, don't touch anything that _doesn't_ look like it could kill you because it probably could anyway. Can I have my radio now?"

Dad's mouth went all pursed—but he held out his hands and let Nikko take an earpiece anyway.

"You forgot 'keep an eye out for any signs that say BRIDGE OF SOULS HERE'," Cal added, snagging an earpiece of his own.

"Keep an eye out for anything that looks interesting at all," Dad corrected. He kept his hands where they were long enough for Juliet and Vincent to take earpieces for themselves, and then put the last one in his own ear. "We have no idea what this thing looks like or what it does, and we may not have very much time. There's been enough rumors circulating about the Bridge lately that I wouldn't be surprised if Dorna's picked them up, same as we have. Maggie?"

"Coming through loud and clear," Maggie's voice said into Nikko's ear, calm and faintly amused. "These have better range and battery life than our old radios and they'll work better underground, but no guarantees. If you start hearing a lot of static, you might want to think about turning around."

"Perfect," Dad said, and nodded even though Maggie couldn't see him, because despite spending his life making Indiana Jones look lazy, he was still kind of a giant loser. "Vincent, I want you outside. If Dorna's going to be nipping at our heels, I'd like a little warning before they can corner us in here. Juliet, you're with me searching the west side, and Nikko and Cal—"

"Him? Again?" Nikko made a face. "This is punishment, isn't it? You're punishing me for something. Dad, when someone makes you angry, you need to talk to them about it like an adult—"

"Can it, Nikko," Dad said pleasantly, and blithely ignored the way Juliet was giggling into her sleeve.

"Yeah," Cal murmured, tone innocent, as though he were just responsibly repeating advice he thought Nikko might not have heard. "Can it, Nikko."

"You too, Cal," Dad said. "Snipe at each other all you want on your own time. When we're working, you're colleagues. Act like it."

Dad's voice got a little sharp, and it almost stung—Nikko had to bite down on the urge to say ... what? That Dad didn't understand, maybe. That even if Nikko didn't mind all that much, he _had_ to protest, because otherwise it would seem weird. This push-pull thing he had going with Cal had rules, even if they were unwritten ones. Dad just didn't get it.

Not that Nikko didn't mind, because he totally did. Cal was smart or whatever, fine, but he was also bossy, annoying, and incredibly patronizing. Why couldn't Dad ever send Nikko off to explore stuff with Juliet? She liked telling Nikko he was wrong about everything, too, but at least she was kind of nice about it.

"Juliet," Dad said again, "you're with me, west. Nikko and Cal, you head east. Radio check-ins every ten minutes. Okay?"

Nikko rolled his eyes but nodded.

"You got it, Solomon," Cal said, and turned around to head down the temple's eastern corridor without even glancing back to make sure Nikko was following.

Jerk.

  


*

  


The temple had a name, but Nikko couldn't remember what it was—it had a lot of Xes and Ls in it, and T-Ls too. That was Nahuatl for you.

It was up in the mountains in the middle of nowhere, as so many places where people decided to stow their weirdly powerful artifacts seemed to be. And while it was a pretty normal stepped-pyramid sort of shape aboveground (it was possible, Nikko could admit, that using "normal" for that meant he'd seen a few too many ziggurats in his life), the real treat was underneath. As best Maggie could tell from the geological scans she had to work with, the temple complex went on for quite a ways underground, carved into the side of the mountain. And north was back toward the front of the complex, rather than further in, which obviously meant they should have turned _left_ at that last intersection.

" _No_ ," Cal said, for like the fourth time, "we _shouldn't_ have. You heard Maggie. These radios might be better than our old ones, but they're not perfect, and we shouldn't—"

"Yeah, of course," Nikko said, throwing up his hands and sending his flashlight beam bouncing off the ceiling, "because everybody stashes their weirdly powerful artifacts at the _front_ of their ancient haunted tombs or whatever—"

"We don't even know whether the Bridge is still here," Cal snapped.

"Okay, but if it is we aren't going to find it by checking all the foyers—"

In Nikko's ear, Maggie delicately cleared her throat, and out of the corner of his eye, Nikko saw Cal jump—there had probably been a click when she first engaged the radio, but evidently neither one of them had noticed it. Oops.

"Much as I hate to interrupt," Maggie said, dry, "I've got an update from Vincent. He's taken the helicopter up to the nearest summit, and he's spotted some movement he thinks might be vehicles on the other side of the mountain."

"Dorna," Cal said.

"Not sure who else would be out here," Maggie agreed. "We've still got a couple hours, by his estimate—just don't go so far in you can't make it back out to our camp by—"

In all honesty, Nikko wasn't entirely sure exactly what had happened next, when he went back over it later. He and Cal could listen to Maggie and walk at the same time, and so they were; and one or the other of them—maybe even both?—stepped on something, or touched something, or must have shifted their weight somehow. Whatever the reason, something in the corridor made a clear, mechanical _click_. They had a split second, just long enough for their gazes to meet in dismay; and then the rocks started falling.

There was kind of a rumble, and it seemed to be concentrated above but also a little bit behind them, so Nikko dove forward. Something must have been making it over the radio, because Maggie was shouting now, Nikko's name and Cal's, and even though she was doing it right into Nikko's ear, he could barely hear it over the grinding thunder of rocks slamming into each other. Something clipped his shoulder, knocked him sideways and pushed the breath out of him, and he rolled over—into something softer; Cal?—and flung his hands up.

It wasn't that he'd had the telekinesis long enough to get used to it or anything. He'd hardly even used it since the soda can. He'd had enough lectures from Juliet about the scientific method that the first thing he'd done after had been to head up to his room, lock the door, and test it until he was sure—but he didn't know what to do with it, what to say about it, even to Dad. Sometimes he half-hoped it was just going to go away again.

So it was just sheer stupid reflex to put his hands between his face and the three tons of rocks falling at it, and he was almost surprised when it didn't end with him crushed into paste.

The boulder that had been about to squash him—and Cal, too, so yay telekinesis—slowed down and then just sort of bounced off of nothing. It made a noise a little like it had hit something, but there was nothing there, and then it careened off sideways and slammed into the temple floor next to them.

There was no time to think, no time to worry. Cal had his head down, his arms curled around it, but Nikko would still have grabbed him even if he hadn't, would still have braced his telekinesis against the mass of rocks that had already come down and _pushed_. It was just luck that Cal didn't see him do it.

They shoved off like they'd been pushed and skidded almost half a dozen feet across the temple floor, just in time for another monster boulder to crack the stone tile right where they'd been lying. But the rumbling sound was mostly gone, dying away—Nikko's flashlight had flown out of his hand, but he still had his headlamp on, and he watched two more smaller rocks (only the size of his torso! Great!) tumble down and fall, one stone the size of his head, and then all of a sudden it was almost absurdly silent.

Except, Nikko realized, for the panicked gasping that was still coming from him and Cal.

"Jesus," Cal hissed, and then rolled over—it pulled his arm out of Nikko's grip, and Nikko almost grabbed after it, thoughtless, except that would be stupid. They were fine, they were safe. At least for the moment.

Nikko swallowed, and looked up and down the wall of rocks he was facing so that his headlamp would pan over it. That was a _lot_ of stone, and it was filling the hallway, all the way up to the opening in the ceiling that it had apparently poured out of. They could _try_ moving some of what they could reach, hoping the rest would fall down and then they could climb over the top. But that didn't really seem like a great idea, considering they'd almost been crushed twice already.

"Jesus," Cal said again. His headlamp was askew, and the casing around the bulb had cracked, but it was still working—he could see that the way back was blocked, even without any help from Nikko.

There was a click from the radio: this time Nikko heard it. "Cal? Nikko?" Maggie said, and she was only a moment ahead of Dad's, "Boys? Boys!"

"We're okay," Nikko said, but they talked over it as if they hadn't heard—he reached up and felt around and oh, yeah. The part of his radio that was actually in his ear was fine, and apparently that part had the receiver in it along with the speaker; but the section with the microphone had jutted down over the hinge of his jaw, and he could feel it give where the plastic had cracked, where a piece had broken off. A little blood was stuck to his fingers when he lowered them again—the edge had dug into his cheek and cut.

Cal's headlamp flashed in Nikko's eyes, blinding, and then he caught Nikko by the wrist while Nikko was still blinking the afterimages away. "Don't touch it," he said, "you'll get dirt in it," and then he raised a hand to his own earpiece and said more loudly, "We're fine."

"Cal," Maggie said, warm with relief.

"I'm fine, Nikko's fine—scrapes, probably, but the adrenaline's still going pretty good, so if they're there I can't feel them. Nikko's earpiece broke, he cut his face but he's okay. He's receiving but his mic is out."

"What happened?" Dad said sharply.

"Trap," Nikko said, and then grimaced—Jesus, it was easy to forget they couldn't hear him.

Cal looked at him, a little bit sidelong to avoid shining the headlamp in Nikko's face again, and his mouth quirked.

"Yeah, laugh it up," Nikko murmured.

"Trap," Cal repeated into the radio instead, because when did he ever do what Nikko said? Never, that was when. "Neither of us saw anything, but right before the rocks came down something—clicked."

"'Before the _rocks_ came down'?" Dad echoed. "And you're sure you're both all right?"

Nikko froze. He shouldn't have, Cal was still touching his wrist—and Cal did feel it, he gave Nikko a funny look. Unless that was because Cal was remembering, unless he had noticed something—

"Yeah," Cal said, "we're fine. I think we were almost past the trap when it went. We both jumped forward instead of trying to back out—"

"Of course you did," Juliet murmured through the radio.

"—and then, uh, I guess Nikko got a good foothold or something," Cal added, sounding sheepish, "and he pushed us both clear." He paused for a second, and then, looking Nikko in the eye, said, "Thanks, man."

Because he just _had_ to be totally straightforward and nice about it when it mattered the most. Jerk.

"Yeah, whatever," Nikko muttered, looking away and feeling his neck go hot.

"And the corridor?" Maggie said.

"Blocked," Cal reported, before Nikko could make a fool of himself a second time trying to answer. "If we get out of here, it's not going to be by going out the same way we came in."

"All right," Dad said, and he didn't sound happy about it, but he'd lost the worst of the worried edge to his voice. "All right. I'll have Vincent scout around for other exits in your direction. You keep your radios on, and you let us know if you start feeling dizzy or short of breath—could be injuries, could be the air supply, but either way you have to tell us. Okay?"

"Okay," Cal said.

"And be careful," Maggie added.

On impulse, Nikko leaned in—toward Cal's ear, speaking up, until he could hear the doubled echo of his own voice over the radio. "Come on, Maggie—aren't we always?"

Cal twitched away, and Nikko realized a little too late that he'd kind of invaded Cal's personal space there, which made his neck go hot again; but Cal just let out half a chuckle, a huff of breath through his nose, and shook his head. "Yeah," he said, "so careful we set off a rockslide."

Nikko punched him in the arm.

  


*

  


Since it was Cal's awesome decision-making skills that had sent them into the trap, Nikko refused to double down when they hit another intersection. Cal was insistent that there was a faint breeze coming from the hallway heading off to the right; but that would put them going parallel to the front of the temple. There wouldn't _be_ a corridor that went straight unless there was something straight ahead that was worth getting to, and that was bound to be a door out, right? It only made sense.

"Fine, whatever," Cal huffed.

They went straight.

Dad and Juliet had kept going east, and Nikko and Cal were far enough into the western half of the complex to be out of their radios' range. But Maggie still intersected with everybody, and Dad's ten-minute check-in rule had turned into a five-minute check-in rule after the whole rockslide thing. So Nikko was turning to bug Cal about calling in again, and that was why he spotted the light.

It was really dim, but it was definitely there—and it had that bluish clearness of daylight to it, nothing like the warm yellow light from their headlamps, so it wasn't just some kind of weird reflection.

It was off ahead of them a ways, more on Cal's side of the hallway than Nikko's, but Nikko wasn't going to let Cal take the credit for it. He grabbed Cal's arm, ignoring Cal's irritated "Hey!", and pointed to the light with his free hand even as he pulled Cal toward it.

"Look, see? I _told_ you."

"For all you know," Cal said, "we'd have found a way out if we'd gone the other way, too." But his heart wasn't really in it—which was only fitting, because he was _wrong_.

The light wasn't coming from any sort of doorway, but there was an opening: a gap in the rock. It was wet, which was probably why there was a gap at all—the water must have slowly worn away the stone here, and this high in the mountains, it would've gone through cycles of freezing and thawing that would've helped crack the rock apart. And it was just wide enough that Nikko could probably fit through it, if he turned sideways, held his breath, and didn't mind a few more scrapes.

"Wait," Cal said, "wait—Nikko, hang on," but Nikko ignored him. If he wanted to argue some more, they could do that once they were outside.

It was a pretty uncomfortable squeeze, and once Nikko had forced himself the first part of the way in, he didn't even have enough space to turn his head around. Cal yanking on his arm wasn't helping, and he ended up having to snap, "Cut it _out_ , man," a lot louder than he might have otherwise, wanting Cal to hear him even though his face was turned away.

He wiggled his way in a little further on his own, and then he got a hand on the surface of the mountain outside and Cal started pushing instead of pulling, both of which helped a lot. The rock jutted out a bit in just the right place to give Nikko a nasty set of scratches over one hip; and then he closed his eyes and sucked his breath in and shoved, and he was through. It was actually a little colder outside the temple than it had been inside, but, man, was it ever good to feel a real breeze.

There was a bit of a drop on the outside of the gap, but then the mountainside leveled off some—it wasn't far enough that Nikko couldn't reach back up and in and wiggle his fingers at Cal.

"Come on, come on. It's fine!"

"Yeah, yeah," Cal muttered.

It was kind of obnoxious how much easier it was for him—he was just kind of a narrower dude. Taller, too, though, which meant he had to inch through at a little bit of an angle. His head and shoulders were out before his feet, so Nikko reached up and steadied him while he worked himself the rest of the way through.

That was why Nikko didn't notice the guy behind him until the barrel of the gun came down against his shoulder.

"Aw, crap," Cal said, jerking back—but he didn't get far before a different guy came up on the other side and grabbed his arm.

"Oh, no you don't," the guy with the gun said, and his tone was slick and conversational, almost friendly. But the gun didn't waver. Totally Dorna. Or somebody bad, at least.

The guy nudged Nikko's jaw with the mouth of the gun until Nikko looked at him, and then he smiled like he'd won something, like it counted as surrender to turn your head instead of letting somebody shoot you in the face.

"Yeah?" Nikko said, tilting his chin up.

"Nicholas Zond," the guy said.

"I hate being called that," Nikko told him, but he just kept smiling, smug. Yup. Definitely a bad guy.

"Excellent. Most excellent," the guy added, as though Nikko hadn't said anything at all; and then he reached out and took the earpiece from Nikko's ear—and the other guy did the same to Cal's.

Perfect.

  


  


* * *

  


  


Maggie would figure out something was wrong. Nikko told himself that over and over: as he and Cal had their hands secured with zipties, as the bad guys hustled them over the mountainside, when at last the bad guys' equally obvious evil Jeeps came into view. (They were black. If you had a black Jeep that was that heavy-duty, you were either a special agent or a bad guy, and these dudes were not special agents.)

Maggie would figure out something was wrong. Cal hadn't checked in the way he was supposed to, and it had been—Nikko didn't know for sure, but it had to have been at least forty-five minutes, maybe even an hour and change. Maggie had definitely noticed, and she would tell Dad and Vincent, and Vincent would come kick people in the face and break their necks and all those other things he did.

In the meantime, especially if you were being stuffed in the back of a Jeep and bouncing away toward a bad guy's hidden base of operations in the middle of nowhere, it was important to find ways to entertain yourself.

"—and if we'd just gone left in the _first_ place, which is exactly what I said we should do—"

"—then we'd probably have set off something _else_ ," Cal spat, "and we would've been too far away from the surface to find another way out!"

Nikko wanted to stab a finger into Cal's face, but it wasn't really possible with his hands bound behind his back. "So you admit we had to head toward the front to get out—"

"And if we'd gone _right_ ," Cal interrupted, "then we would've been closer to Maggie—closer to your dad, closer to Vincent, and maybe we wouldn't even be in this mess! Which might also be true if you'd bothered to actually take a look around—"

"For Christ's sake," cried one of the bad guys up front, and he turned around and leveled his gun over the back of the seat at them. "Do you two _ever_ stop arguing?!"

Nikko looked at Cal and shrugged his shoulders; Cal blinked at him and shrugged back. "Sometimes we're asleep," Nikko said, and Cal almost—almost—cracked a smile.

"Oh, very clever," the guy said, and used the gun to shove Nikko backwards until he smacked into the Jeep's hatch. "You shut up or I gag you. Got it?"

"Just me?" Nikko said. "Because I have to tell you, buddy, it takes two to tango. I'm not arguing with myself back here, he's the one who won't admit that I'm—"

"What? Right? You're _not_ right, that's why. You're this completely different other thing that I personally like to call _wrong_ —"

"For Christ's sake!"

  


*

  


They didn't get gagged, although it was a close thing for a minute. One of the guys was actually making as though to climb over the back seat and do it when the driver snapped, "Leave it, Andrews, we're there."

 _There_ was, as predicted, a bad guy's hidden base of operations in the middle of nowhere. Nikko wondered absently whether Dorna maybe had some kind of team movie night, getting together to watch bad Bond flicks and take notes.

It was actually a little funny—it only made sense if they wanted to stay under the radar, but looking at it, it was like they'd copied the temple: there was just a sort of grim-looking concrete bunker-type thing up top, but the Dorna flunkies dragged them in and then down, and underground the place was a lot bigger.

"Wow, creepy," Nikko murmured, as though he meant it approvingly. "Especially how basically all of these hallways look exactly the same. Are you just really incompetent interior decorators, or is that, like, strategy to stop people from being able to find their way out?"

"Not that they'd need it for you," Cal said, dry, "since we've proven you can get into trouble just going in a straight line."

"Yep," Nikko agreed. "Seriously, just imagine how much worse it might have gotten if we'd added that right turn into the mix."

Cal rolled his eyes, and he was about to say something else except then the guy pushing him along shoved him sideways—through a door, and then Nikko's flunky pushed Nikko through, too.

The room the door led into made Nikko think of prison in Tibet, and he shuddered a little, unable to stop it. It wasn't like it _looked_ the same—no window, obviously, and this place was concrete, not stone, with a big column in the middle of the room and, oh, awesome, chains. Also, probably there weren't any childhood friends of Vincent's next door.

But there was something about the air in here, about the way it felt, that made you think about everybody else who must've been dragged in before you—about how alone they must've been, how sad and afraid; about how this room had probably been the last thing they'd seen before they died.

The column with the chains on it, though, was way more like the room where they'd taken Nikko and Gyatso so they could beat Nikko until Gyatso talked. Ah, memories.

The flunkies tugged Nikko and Cal over to the column, and they were flunkies but not complete idiots: they put the shackles on first, and only cut the zipties after.

"Good, great," Cal said, over the clatter of chains. "This is exactly what I wanted to be doing today."

"Well," Nikko said, "maybe we wouldn't be if we'd just gone left."

"Oh, _please_ , you just—"

Cal didn't get a chance to finish, and for once it wasn't because of Nikko. The guy chaining Cal up was the same guy who'd been in the back seat of the Jeep, and apparently he hadn't been kidding about being tired of them fighting. Nikko couldn't see any of it, but there was a sound of flesh meeting flesh, a bitten-off noise of surprise and pain, and Nikko could feel through the column, where his back was pressed against it, the impact of Cal's head hitting the other side.

"Hey!" Nikko yelled. He couldn't reach Back Seat Guy; he kicked out a little at the guy he _could_ reach instead, and that guy cursed and spat at him, shoved him.

Cal didn't say anything; but Nikko craned his head around the column far enough to see Cal's arm, and at the very least he was still standing up.

"Yeah," Back Seat Guy sneered, "that's right. You keep your damn mouth shut."

He turned and left, the other guy following him with one more sneer at Nikko, and then as soon as the door had closed behind them, Nikko said, "Cal—Cal, you okay?"

It took maybe five, ten seconds for Cal to answer; but every one of them felt like a minute while Nikko was waiting for that answer to be no. But then Cal coughed and said, a little thickly, "Yeah, Nikko, I'm okay. Man, blood tastes gross."

Nikko tipped his head back against the column and closed his eyes. Jesus. Okay. Cal was fine.

"Don't think he knocked out any teeth, though," Cal added.

Nikko sucked in a breath and let it out, and then forced his voice to come out dry, a little mocking. "Some people just don't take pride in their work."

  


*

  


With no windows, no way to see outside, it was even harder to tell how much time was passing—they hadn't taken Nikko's watch, and his hands weren't exactly behind his back anymore, but he couldn't get the watch face to tilt far enough to let him read it. And the light wasn't good enough either; along with the earpieces, the flunkies had taken their headlamps, too.

But they were chained up long enough for Nikko to start feeling hungry, thirsty, and long enough for his wrists to start aching a little with the weight and the cold of the shackles.

And then, finally, the door opened again.

The flunkies had been dressed like guys who'd intended to wander around in the mountains kidnapping people: combat boots, tough dull clothes, that kind of thing. But the man who walked in this time didn't look like that. He was all—slacks, a blazer, gleaming shoes. Except for the lack of a tie, Nikko wouldn't have been surprised to see him walking down the halls of Brighton. If the flunkies were, like, building and grounds, then this guy was Dorna middle management.

"Well, well, well," Middle Management said, in that slow satisfied way bad guys said things when they had you right where they wanted you. There were steps down from the doorway; Middle Management took them one at a time, no hurry, and then slowly circled the column until he was facing Nikko. He smiled.

Nikko raised an eyebrow at him.

"What a pleasant surprise it is to see you here, Mr. Zond," Middle Management said.

"Gosh, wish I could say the same," Nikko said, with as much false brightness as he could muster.

Middle Management looked at him with an almost fond sort of dismay, a chastising expression, the way you might look at a really cute puppy who'd chewed on something you hated anyway. "Yes, by all means," Middle Management said kindly, "get the petty joke-making out of the way while you can. You'll lose your taste for it shortly."

"Yeah, I don't know about that," Cal said, from the other side of the column. "It's been like a year, year and a half, and he really hasn't shown any signs of slowing down."

"I suspect you have not given him sufficient motivation, Mr. Banks," Middle Management said, without looking away from Nikko. "But we will see which of us has the right of it soon enough. You are here for a reason, aren't you, Mr. Zond? You are looking for the Bridge of Souls."

"Pro tip," Nikko said. "If you want me to answer the questions, you have to not answer them first."

Middle Management's mouth went flat. He took a step forward and leaned in, and Nikko wanted to lean away but the column was right there behind him. "Did you find it?"

"Didn't you debrief those guys who brought us in?" Nikko said. "If we'd found anything interesting, you'd have it already, dude—"

"Did your _team_ find it?" Middle Management snapped.

Nikko shrugged; it made the chains jangle. "You'd know better than we would. You grabbed us right before we were about to radio in. The better question is why the hell you're even asking. You've got a base set up out here—why? If you knew the Bridge was in there, why haven't you already gone in and gotten it?"

Middle Management didn't answer—it was Cal who said, "Because they couldn't find it."

"Yeah?" Nikko said to Middle Management, who was glowering at Cal furiously. "Is that it? I guess that makes sense."

"All that chatter about the Bridge surfacing at once," Cal said. "Maggie thought it was strange—so did Vincent. But we were never going to have a better shot at it, and we didn't want it falling into your hands. Should've known it was you."

"So you're so bad at your job you tried to get my dad to do it for you?" Nikko shook his head. "Have a little professional pride, man—"

"Shut up," Middle Management ground out. "Mr. Zond, my patience is limited. Did your team find the Bridge?"

"I told you," Nikko said, "I don't know," but he could see in Middle Management's face that Middle Management didn't believe him. And, dammit, maybe they should have tried to be a little less annoying—Middle Management wasn't going to believe anything Nikko said right away, not when he thought Nikko was going to try to deliberately piss him off.

"Three strikes," Middle Management said softly, leaning in again. "Did your team find the Bridge?"

"I don't _know_."

Middle Management let out a little sigh through his nose and straightened up again. "Very well," he said, and stalked around the column until Nikko could barely see him past its curve. "We can do this the messy way."

It had been hours, but it wasn't like Nikko had forgotten what it had sounded like when that first guy had hit Cal—the smack of the blow, the noise Cal tried to swallow down. It was easy enough to tell it was happening again. "Hey—!"

"Did your team find the Bridge?" Middle Management repeated.

"I don't know! I don't know, I swear—"

Another blow, and this time it was followed by the wet sound of Cal spitting on the floor. _Blood tastes gross,_ Nikko thought a little hysterically.

"Stop, stop," Nikko said, "just stop—I'm the one who's not telling you what you want to hear, why are you—"

Middle Management came back into view, though not all the way around to Nikko's side of the column. He was still moving with those slow, even steps—and he was still middle management but it was more like mafia middle management this time, crisp sleeves rolled up, gleaming watch and reddened knuckles, one bloody where it must've caught one of Cal's teeth.

"Yeah," Cal managed, and then paused to spit again. "He's the one pissing you off. Smack _him_ around for a minute."

With Nikko's head twisted around about as far as it would go and his cheek pressed against the column, he could see Middle Management smile. "I would be delighted to," he said, and Nikko didn't think he was lying. "However, if Solomon Zond did find the Bridge, he might very well give it to us to get his son back in one piece. He is somewhat less likely to give in for the sake of an above-average research assistant and his son's dead body. You, Mr. Banks, are the expendable one here."

Nikko waited for Cal to tell Middle Management he was full of it, to spit a third time onto his shining shoes or even just tell him to go fuck himself—but Cal didn't say anything and didn't say anything and didn't say anything, and Middle Management's satisfied gaze swung back to Nikko.

"Let's try to be thorough, shall we? If your team has found the Bridge, where will they take it?"

Nikko hesitated. He could guess, maybe, except Dorna probably shouldn't be given directions to Veritas's property in Mexico—and odds were Dad wasn't even there, Bridge or no Bridge, because he and Vincent and Maggie and Juliet would all be going nuts looking for Nikko and Cal—

"It's okay," Cal rasped. "Tell him."

 _Tell him_ —but Cal didn't mean that the way it sounded. Cal was stubborn as hell, that was part of what made him so annoying. Cal wouldn't tell Nikko to give in.

Nikko braced himself inwardly. "I don't know," he told Middle Management, as clear and chilly as he could manage; and Middle Management shook his head and walked back around to Cal's side of the column with those slow, even steps.

  


*

  


Middle Management had probably done this before, or else he'd been coached by somebody who had. He didn't lose his temper, not really, and he never did too much, never pushed too hard. He didn't knock Cal out, and he took breaks, left the room—just long enough to let Nikko think maybe he wasn't coming back this time, to give Cal a chance to really start to feel where Middle Management had been hitting him.

But after the third time he left and came back, Middle Management was starting to fray a bit. He asked Nikko something—Nikko was barely even listening to the questions anymore, because if he did that then he might actually think about answering instead of saying _I don't know_ again.

And then Middle Management stopped talking, which was his cue. "I don't know," Nikko said, sick with it, knowing what would happen next; except this time, it didn't happen.

Middle Management looked exasperated—possibly, Nikko thought, he was imagining the dry-cleaning bill for that stupid crisp white shirt, since Cal was continuing to inconveniently speckle it with blood. The nerve.

"It occurs to me that perhaps you think I am not serious about this," Middle Management said. "Perhaps you have been telling yourself that your friend Mr. Banks can handle a blacked eye, a sore mouth, a few cracked ribs. Perhaps I'm the one who has been failing to give you sufficient motivation," and from somewhere under the blazer—oh, shit—Middle Management pulled a really, really sharp knife.

"That seems like kind of an unnecessary escalation," Cal croaked blearily, faint enough that Nikko barely caught it over his own heart pounding.

"Believe me, Mr. Banks," Middle Management said, turning the knife over in his hand, "I am certainly hoping for you to prove yourself useful. But if the pair of you continue to obstruct us in this matter, it's possible the satisfaction of cutting you open and leaving you to bleed out may overpower my sense of restraint."

There was an edge of irritation to it, but mostly it came out matter-of-fact, explanatory. That made it creepier. Also, the knife. "Look, you think this is fun for us?" Nikko said. "We don't _know_ anything—"

That, at last, sent a flash of anger across Middle Management's face. He came around the column to Nikko's side, which at least got the knife further away from Cal—Nikko was glad about that right up until Middle Management leaned in and pressed the cold flat of it against Nikko's cheek. "As you have been assuring me for the past hour and a half, Mr. Zond," Middle Management bit out. "The problem with Veritas is that you take such pride in your status as—as Knights of the Round Table, let us say. In your integrity, your righteousness, your loyalty to one another. If you expect me to believe you wouldn't lie to me for your father's sake, you've underestimated me most uncharitably."

He drew the knife toward himself, tilting it, so that the edge just barely scraped along Nikko's cheek; and then he held it up demonstratively and tilted his head toward it.

"So I find myself needing to offer you the strongest incentive possible."

"No," Nikko said, which was stupid and useless but also seemed to be the only word in his head. "No, no—"

"I imagine," Middle Management said thoughtfully, "that Mr. Banks will do his best not to scream. But we all have our limits, don't we, Mr. Zond?"

Nikko had never tried it like this—never with his hands bound back, and never against a person.

But he barely even had to try, it felt like. Middle Management smiled, nothing humorous or kind in it, and turned that damn knife in his hand. He took half a step at most, maybe shifted his weight, and it just exploded out of Nikko, invisible force like the hand of God.

Middle Management flew backward; Nikko saw the look of almost ridiculous surprise that crossed his face before he slammed into the wall behind him. He hung there for a second, limp, a puppet suspended. And then Nikko let out a shaky breath, and Middle Management slid to the floor in a heap, the knife clattering away somewhere.

He was down, unconscious, not likely to wake up any time soon, but Nikko was still frozen for a second. Jesus. Shit. _Jesus_. Had he really—?

Didn't matter. There was other stuff to worry about.

Nikko sucked in one shaky breath and then another. The good news was, Cal was still facing the other side of the room. He hadn't seen anything. He seemed to have noticed something, heard the thump of Middle Management smacking into the wall, because he managed a thready, "Nikko—?"

"Yup, yes, hi. Everything's fine, Cal, everything's just fine. Just wait one second, okay?"

Keys. They needed the keys. Nikko tried to concentrate, tried to think about keys and capture that sense of touching things he couldn't reach, of _pulling_ —and then there was a tearing sound, and a second later a ring of keys burst through the side of Middle Management's blazer and landed in Nikko's hand.

"Okay," Nikko said, blinking down at them. "Okay, that is—very useful."

  


*

  


Nikko freed himself and then lurched around the column—damn, his legs were stiff—to get at Cal's chains. Cal was going to look way worse in a day or two, Nikko knew, but honestly he looked pretty crappy already: there was a lot of puffiness to his face, his jaw, dark bruising starting to show, and one of his eyes was almost swollen shut.

He was conscious, but he didn't quite seem to be tracking, his gaze a beat behind where Nikko actually was, and the only reason he was still standing up was because he was leaning heavily against the column. Nikko thought back to the first smack he'd been dealt, the way his head had cracked backward into the column—he probably had a concussion. You didn't have to pass out for that, Maggie had been real clear about that the last time she'd pulled Nikko aside to coach him on first aid.

"Hey, Cal," Nikko said quietly, because Cal's head was probably really throbbing.

"Nikko," Cal murmured.

"Yup, that's me. Here, just—just come over here with me for a minute, man—" He managed to tug one of Cal's arms over his shoulders, and together they crossed back over to where Middle Management was lying on the floor.

Then Cal got to sit down, which he seemed pretty okay with, while Nikko went through the rest of Middle Management's pockets. And grabbed the knife off the floor, while he was at it, because hey. Might be useful.

Aside from the keys and the knife, though, the only other things Middle Management seemed to have were Nikko's and Cal's radios—which would have been great except that Nikko's was still broken, and Cal's seemed to have gotten crushed when Middle Management had hit the wall. Even Nikko's wasn't much good without a mic, and Maggie probably wasn't even using that frequency anymore anyway, not when Nikko and Cal had been captured with radios that were set to it. She wasn't stupid.

Nikko sighed and made to fling the earpieces over his shoulder, but Cal flailed a hand out and grabbed at Nikko's wrist. "No," Cal said.

"What—they're busted, man, they're no good to us," Nikko tried.

"No," Cal said again. "No, we need them."

"Cal—" Nikko stopped. This really wasn't the right time for an argument, and Cal wasn't in any shape for one anyway. If Cal's concussed brain somehow thought it was important for Nikko to keep a couple broken radios in his pocket, then Nikko could keep a couple broken radios in his pocket. "Okay, all right. We need them. See? Putting them away."

What else? Nikko stuck the knife through his belt—on the side away from Cal, because the last thing he needed was to stab Cal in the leg by mistake—and then heaved Cal's arm back over his shoulder.

"Okay, man, let's get the hell out of here."

  


*

  


Getting out honestly wasn't that hard, even with all the identical hallways. Nikko did his best to keep Cal awake and moving, but Cal was still pretty out of it. So there was nothing to stop Nikko from leaving him propped against a doorway, heading around the next corner and throwing a few Dorna goons around with the telekinesis, and then going back and helping Cal pick his wobbly way past their unconscious bodies.

Once they got outside, they had to stay low while they were creeping past the Jeeps. By that point there were alarms going off and Dorna guards muttering hurriedly into their radios, and the confusion actually made it even easier to slip out in the shadows without drawing any attention.

And there were a lot of shadows, because the sun had already set. Nikko remembered getting out of the temple and feeling grateful for the breeze, but he couldn't summon that feeling back: it was freaking _cold_ , the wind slicing right through them.

Nikko pushed as hard as he dared, because the further away from the Dorna base they were, the better. But the dark and the cold were bad and getting worse, and the footing wasn't helping—the mountains around here were rocky, not well-traveled, and there wasn't any sort of path to follow through the brush or between the stubby little mountain trees. They were already having a hard enough time without either one of them stepping wrong and breaking an ankle.

They got far enough away that they couldn't see any more lights or hear any more voices; and then they went a little further, a little further; and then it got even darker, and finally Nikko had to use the last of the waning twilight to find a place to stop. It was freezing, and Cal was still doing his level best to stumble along at Nikko's pace but he was leaning on Nikko more and more heavily, shaking a little, unsettlingly silent.

Nikko got Cal to sit down, and then he scouted around as best he could—if only Middle Management had had their stupid headlamps instead of the goddamn broken radios. Finally, half by touch, he managed to find a spot: it wasn't quite a real cave, but there was a rock face that had kind of cracked off at the bottom corner, scrub growing up thick all around it. There was probably enough room for him and Cal both to fit in there. Cal was skinny.

Cal wasn't sitting up anymore when Nikko got back to him, and for a second Nikko almost panicked; but Cal opened his eyes, or at least his good eye, when Nikko grabbed his shoulders, and he went willingly enough when Nikko hauled him up. It was weird, unnerving, to see him so quiet and pliable—but his head had to be killing him, and the rest of him, too. If somebody had whaled on Nikko for an hour, he'd be only too happy to let someone else make all his decisions for a while.

Once he had Cal tucked up safely in the hollow in the rock, Nikko got down on his elbows right out front.

Cal made a blurry, inquisitive noise.

"It's fine, dude," Nikko murmured, "it's fine. Somebody's got to keep watch, and I'm pretty sure you're not up to it. If Dorna doesn't find us before it really gets dark, then they probably won't find us at all." Nikko settled in and let his eyes relax the way Vincent had taught him to, not focusing on any spot in particular but just letting the awareness of everything in front of him seep in. "It's fine. We're going to be fine."

  


  


* * *

  


  


Nikko came awake with a jolt, and then for a second he thought he hadn't: he couldn't see anything but blackness. But, no, his eyes were open—it was dark, _really_ dark. Had to be overcast, too, or else he would at least be able to see the stars.

He blinked twice and then felt around. There was the rock face, there was the edge where it started to curve under itself, and there was—

Nikko almost recoiled, some part of his brain that remembered a lot of horror movies screaming _WE'VE SEEN THIS ONE, DEAD BODY DEAD BODY DEAD BODY_ , and then he got a grip and his heart started to pound for a completely different reason, because _crap_ , Cal was cold.

"Cal? Cal!" Nikko said as loudly as he dared, and he didn't want to hit Cal's bruised face, so he settled for shaking Cal's arm.

For a second, nothing happened, and Nikko's stomach tried to crawl into his shoes, _dead body_. But then Cal's arm tensed under Nikko's hand.

"Cal," Nikko said again.

This time he got a faint noise back.

"Cal, Jesus." Nikko closed his eyes for a second, and then made himself think about Maggie again, her careful doctor's hands. He touched Cal's hand, the side of his face. "Cal, man, you're way too cold—"

"'m fine," Cal murmured, which was either a complete lie or meant he couldn't even tell anymore and was totally hypothermic. Great.

"Yeah, right," Nikko said. "Come on, come on, turn— _Jesus_ ," because his hand had brushed the rock behind Cal and good God, that was cold. "Crap, okay," and he got Cal onto his back and then steeled himself, pushed an arm beneath Cal's neck to cushion his head a little and tucked his knees sideways under Cal's.

If Juliet found them, she would probably take a picture before she helped them out. And then Nikko would find it photocopied onto the backs of all his homework assignments for the next six months.

"All right," Nikko said, "come on. You have to stay awake for a little while, okay? You have to tell me if you start feeling cold."

Cal mumbled something completely indistinct.

"What is it with you and hypothermia anyway? First Antarctica and now this." Nikko scoffed a breath—mostly into Cal's hair. "Seriously, I can't take you anywhere. You should invest in a little subcutaneous fat, dude."

"Hmm," Cal said. "'m tired."

"I know you are," Nikko said, "I know that, but you can't—you can't go anywhere, okay? You can't leave. Not until we get this figured out." Talking, that was the key. If he could just keep Cal talking—

"Bridge?" Cal said.

"Yeah, sure," Nikko said, "the Bridge. What if they did find it? You know there were probably clues or something, a riddle—there always is. And nobody's better at that stuff than Dad and Juliet. What if they've got it right now? What if it's got all kinds of weird—codes and stuff, glyphs or something?"

"Mm," Cal said.

"We're going to need you for that, Cal." Nikko was starting to ramble—somewhere kind of far away, the thought that he should be embarrassed about it drifted by. But it was cold and so incredibly dark; it was like there was nothing in the world except Nikko's own voice, except the feeling it made buzzing in his throat and the pressure of Cal's head on his arm, and Cal was half-asleep, half-gone anyway. It was like Nikko was talking to himself, like he wasn't even talking but just thinking, just listening to himself think.

Possibly he was a touch hypothermic, too.

"This whole thing, this quest my dad is on and everything—you know how important it is—"

"Mm," Cal sighed.

"—I know you do. And—and you're important to _it_ , too, okay? My dad needs your help, he can't do this without you. And I'm not—" Jesus, Nikko really needed to stop talking.

But he'd been bottling himself up all day, saying nothing but _I don't know_ , listening to Middle Management's fists smashing into Cal because of it over and over and over. And now he'd popped the cork on it. He wasn't going to be able to stop.

"I mean, I want to," Nikko murmured, and his throat ached saying it. "I want to help. I want to be _useful_ , as useful to him as you are, but he looks at me and all he sees is a kid, you know? And you—you're so smart, so smart and so _stupid_ and so ridiculously annoying, and you—Cal?"

Cal didn't move, didn't make a sound.

"Cal? Cal, man, come on, don't do this, don't—"

A noise—a noise that wasn't Nikko's own stupid scratchy voice. It was so startling that Nikko froze, and also maybe clutched at Cal a little too hard, because Cal made a soft uncomfortable sound in his ear.

Which was great, because it meant he probably wasn't dead, but bad if that other noise was Dorna and they'd heard him. Nikko hefted Cal's head up a little higher, onto his shoulder, and pressed his other hand carefully over Cal's mouth—not too hard, not where Cal was bruised, but hopefully enough to muffle anything more.

Nikko listened to his own heart pound and tried to breathe as quietly as possible: mouth open and relaxed, no air hissing between his teeth or through his nose. And then, for the first time since he'd woken up, he saw something besides blackness.

Flashlight, had to be—a weak pale light that swung wildly, its full brightness pouring over Nikko's shoulder for a split second and then falling away. Flashlight, and whoever was carrying it was getting closer, because now Nikko could hear their footsteps, crap crap crap—

And then Vincent's voice said, "Nikko? Cal?" and Nikko felt himself go just about boneless with relief.

  


  


* * *

  


  


Vincent still had the helicopter, so there was no bouncing around through the mountains in a Jeep a second time. He'd borrowed it from some military buddy of his and Dad's, too, so it didn't even make much noise: a gentle _thwup-thwup_ , that was all. Dorna wasn't going to hear.

"That's right," Dad said gently, "Dorna's not going to hear," and whoops, Nikko was still thinking out loud.

He really needed to stop doing that—and the easiest way was just to stop thinking completely. Dad was there, stern concerned face, hands so hot he had to have a fever or something; but Maggie was busy with Cal, Juliet leaning over her shoulder with a thermal blanket and some kind of hotpack. She'd get to Dad when she could, probably.

So Nikko closed his eyes and listened to the _thwup-thwup-thwup_ , the soothing flow of Maggie's brisk medical words, and thought about nothing at all.

  


*

  


He woke up with a shudder as his blanket was pulled off. "Jesus, Maggie! Warn a guy."

Maggie smiled at him, calm and doctorly and just a little bit smug. "Feeling better?"

Nikko blinked. The last few things he could remember were pretty fuzzy, but the disorientation was gone, the confusion. He recognized the whitewashed walls of the Veritas building they'd been working out of while they were in the Yucatán—and, of course, the blink and murmur of the machines in Maggie's little mini-hospital. It was kind of sad that she had to have one set up pretty much everywhere they went; but it sure came in handy.

Also he could successfully not say things, which was nice. "Yeah. Am I okay?"

"You should be," Maggie said. "We found you in time to avoid truly severe exposure, thanks to the locating signals in your earpieces. I want to keep an eye on you, but there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to sleep upstairs."

"You better, man. I don't want to have to listen to your snoring all night."

"Cal!" Maggie said, turning—she said it about twice as kindly as she'd said anything to Nikko, but then again, Nikko thought, Cal had to look at least twice as bad as he did.

He was about the same color as the cot he was lying on—a bland industrial off-white—except for where the bruising was really starting to show. His eye wasn't just swollen anymore; the shiner was starting to come through properly, nasty blotches of blue-black and angry purple darkening his eyelid and cheek and the side of his nose. There was a split along the bridge of his nose to go along with the one on his lip, and then a whole lot of deep red swelling where Middle Management had been socking him in the mouth. His ribs and sides were probably pretty bad, too, but all that was still tucked under a whole lot of blanket.

"You okay, man?" Nikko said, because it was the only thing he could say.

"Oh, awesome," Cal slurred.

"You could've just told me the earpieces had trackers in them, dude."

"Yeah, well," Cal said. "I admit it, I wasn't at my most articulate."

"It's a wonder you were even conscious," Maggie said, dry, "considering the concussion you've got."

"Hey—everybody all right?"

Nikko turned. It was Dad in the doorway, with that look on his face that he got when he was trying to pretend he wasn't thinking about never letting Nikko set foot outside ever again.

"Hey, Dad. Yeah, we're fine."

"They will be," Maggie amended.

"It was Dorna," Nikko added, "they were trying to find the Bridge. Or trying to get you to find it for them, I guess."

"Well," Dad said. "It's not for them, but we did find it."

"What, seriously?"

Dad grinned and bounced a little on the balls of his feet. "It's in the lab with Juliet right now." He stopped and cleared his throat. "Well, if the worst is over—Maggie, could I have a word out in the hall?"

Nikko rolled his eyes. Man, sometimes Dad was the least subtle person in the _world_. "Yeah, Dad," he said, "go ahead and ask all the hovering parent questions you want. I'm _fine_."

"I think I'd rather get a medical professional's opinion on the subject," Dad said, dry, "but thanks for your input, Nikko."

Once the door had closed behind them, Nikko turned back toward the cot Cal was lying on—and for a second he thought he was too late, Cal had fallen asleep, but then Cal's eyes flickered back open.

"You look like crap," Nikko said quietly.

"Right back at you," Cal said, which was probably true, though not to the same degree. Nikko had had a really bad, really long day, some cuts and bruises—but nobody had spent an hour and a half punching him in the face.

"Yeah," he said anyway. "Well. It's a good thing we got out of there before that guy could start chopping pieces off you."

"You don't have to tell me," Cal said, and then hesitated. "Speaking of which—I know I hit my head a couple times, but how _did_ we get out of there?"

Nikko went still. "What?"

"Well," Cal said, faint but clear, "I remember he got angry. And then I remember you undoing my cuffs, and him being on the floor. I mean—you were chained up, too. Right?"

"Yeah," Nikko said quickly. "Yeah, no, I—" What could he have done? What could he have used? "The chain! There was a—my side had some loose chain, you probably didn't notice. I tripped him with it and he fell."

The side of Cal's brow that wasn't hidden under a wad of gauze wrinkled up uncertainly. "And the keys were—?"

"In his pocket. I rolled him over with my foot to make sure he was really unconscious, and they fell out." Nikko shrugged, like his heart wasn't jackhammering away; and then, impulsive, said, "Why? What did you think had happened? Next you'll be saying the keys just jumped right into my hand."

He laughed after, and it sounded weird and fake to him but Cal didn't seem to notice—it was kind of hard to be sure with the one eye swollen shut, but Nikko thought Cal looked down, down and then away, and he stayed like that for a second before huffing out half a laugh of his own. "Yeah, hah. I guess—I guess I was pretty out of it."

Nikko swallowed and didn't say anything.

"Well," Cal added after a moment. "I should probably get some sleep."

"Yeah, no, sure," Nikko said, "sure, I'll—get out of your hair, then."

  


*

  


Dad and Maggie weren't in the hallway anymore, as far as Nikko could tell—maybe they'd gone to the lab, to check on Juliet and the Bridge, after Maggie had finished reassuring Dad that Nikko really wasn't made of glass.

Whatever the reason, the hallway was empty. So it was safe for Nikko to take the ring of Dorna's keys out of his pocket and stare at it like a weirdo.

He just—he didn't even know why he was still lying about his powers, except for the very simple reason that it seemed so much easier than stopping. What would he even have said? _So the thing is, I pushed that guy into the wall with my brain._ It wasn't that nobody would believe him—even if they doubted it to start with, he knew he could prove it. But then he'd have to—to _deal_ with it, to understand it, to figure out what it meant. And admit that he'd been hiding it from everybody on purpose, which, helpfully, got harder to explain the longer he did it.

Nikko liked being different. But he liked being different in a smarter-than-you private-jet-plane secret-archaeological-mission way, not because he could punch people without touching them. This thing he could do was a whole new kind of trouble that left blowing up a toilet eating its dust; and maybe it was selfish, maybe it was stupid, but he didn't want to open that can of worms if he didn't have to. Maybe it _would_ just go away again anyhow.

He looked at the keys in his hand. And then he flattened his palm underneath them, and watched them drift up into the air, spinning slowly, teeth gleaming.

Yeah. Maybe it would just go away. Right.

He curled up his hand and looked away, and the keys tumbled, jingling, to the floor.

  


* * *

  


**PART II: CONNECTION**

  


* * *

  


There was a mirror hanging in the stairway of Veritas's private building in Campeche.

Nikko hadn't really paid it any mind, at first; but now, post-Dorna, it was basically his best friend, because it meant he could see whether Cal was in the hallway before he even hit the landing, if he stayed to the right as he came down the steps.

And: clear. Nikko blew out a breath and hurried the rest of the way down before Cal could appear out of a doorway or something, and after that it was just a few more steps to round the corner and get out the door into the courtyard. It was sunny today, the tiles were all warm—nobody would think there was anything weird about Nikko doing his homework out here, and there was basically zero chance of him running into Cal as long as—

"Whoa, sorry."

—Cal stayed in the lab.

Nikko flinched back and just barely managed to keep any part of himself from touching any part of Cal—which was for the best, because otherwise he probably would have knocked Cal right over.

Not that Cal wasn't looking better. Loads better, actually. The bruising was starting to go down, and his bad eye was a way more normal size, even if it was still a pretty lurid color. And he was moving more easily in general than he had been the first couple days after.

But there was still a certain deliberateness about him, in a way that said he was measuring, assessing whether any given motion was worth it. Probably down to the ribs. Cracked ribs sucked. He definitely wouldn't have thanked Nikko if he'd ended up on the ground.

... And now Nikko had just spent like thirty seconds staring at him without saying anything.

"No, hey, no problem, good to see you up and about—" and Jesus, could Nikko sound any more like someone's grandmother? "—and, uh, yeah. You—taking a walk?"

"It's that or Maggie's deep-breathing exercises," Cal said. "Walking hurts less."

"Hah, yeah," Nikko said, and then, before the pause could get too awkwardly long, forced out, "Well, okay, I'll—see you around."

Which was an idiotic thing to say, given that they were living and working in the same building; and the look on Cal's face made it obvious that he'd noticed. So it was actually a sign of how incredibly off with each other they were that all Cal said was, "Yup. See you," instead of rolling his eyes and spending the next five minutes roundly mocking Nikko at every turn.

Nikko nodded, stiff as a wooden puppet, and Cal looked at him silently, mouth flat, and then stepped around him and went inside.

Jesus.

Nikko let his head fall back and squeezed his eyes shut. God, he was being stupid. Cal hadn't seen anything, or at least Nikko had managed to convince him he hadn't—except if Cal hadn't thought Nikko was lying to him then, he almost definitely did now, just because Nikko was being so weird. And he _was_ being weird, he was being _super_ weird, and he needed to get a grip and cut it out.

He opened his eyes again and stared up into the sky. He'd give himself a day. He really did need to do that homework or Juliet was going to get on his case—and that was the last thing he needed, because if she thought there was something up with him she'd keep prying until she found out what it was. He'd sit out here in the courtyard and he'd do his homework and he wouldn't think about Cal at all; and tomorrow he would be totally normal.

Yep.

  


  


* * *

  


  


What was normal? After giving it a little consideration, Nikko was pretty sure that "normal" meant hanging around in the lab being annoying, at least until something he said turned out to suddenly be useful somehow. That was what usually happened, anyway.

So, the next morning, that was exactly what he did.

Dad and Juliet and Cal were all in there working, Maggie at her desk speaking into the phone in low tones. Juliet spotted him first, glancing up from her workstation when he came in the door. "How's the essay going?"

"On your desk," Nikko said. "And this time it's twelve-point _and_ single-spaced, Supreme Dictator."

" _Thank_ you," Juliet said, haughty, and held the face for a moment before she cracked a smile. "Finally came to see it, huh?"

"See—?" Nikko said, and then he caught sight of something gleaming over her shoulder. Of course. He'd been avoiding the lab so hard he hadn't even actually gotten a look at the Bridge of Souls.

It was sitting on one of the lab tables, the surface of the table lit up underneath it and one of Maggie's many, many scanners poised overhead. And whatever it actually was, it sure didn't look like any kind of bridge.

"What _is_ it?" Nikko said, rounding Juliet's workstation to get a better look.

"A mirror," Juliet said. "Pyrite, on a slate backing—possibly alloyed with something, since pyrite by itself usually doesn't last this long. See, there," she added, leaning in and pointing to one edge. "It's just barely starting to flake a little. It might as well have been made six months ago."

Now that she'd said it, Nikko could see what she meant: the middle part was rounded, almost a perfect circle, glittering and reflective. Nikko was used to thinking of mirrors as silvery, that was all, and with the pyrite surface, this one was golden.

"Usually pyrite mirrors like this are found with other artifacts," Juliet added. "Decorative items, or jade spheres that were used in rituals. Scrying, prophesizing—"

"—but whatever went with this one," Dad said, "we're going to have to do without it, because we're not going back into that temple. With Dorna watching the place, it's just too dangerous."

"Where's your spirit of scientific inquiry, Dad?" Nikko said, bending down to get a better look.

The Bridge was also two-handled, which was kind of unusual for a mirror. Instead of one handle going straight down, or any kind of support or stand coming out of the back, it was worked with a frame in some kind of—some kind of stone, maybe, or even bone, clean and white and polished; and on either side of the mirror the frame curved out in a sweeping arc, leaving a gap that was just the right size to slide your fingers into. It looked—it looked like it was _meant_ to be held onto, like being held was what it was for.

And the handles themselves were smooth, but where it rounded the mirror, the frame was carved with all kinds of designs—inscriptions, maybe, or intricate little pictograms, or possibly both if it really was Nahuatl.

Which was probably exactly what was up on the screen Cal was looking at right now on the other side of the lab table. But somehow it didn't seem like a good idea for Nikko to go peering over his shoulder. That would be a little too normal, Nikko needed to work up to that.

So Nikko leaned in even closer and touched one of the handles—just to tilt the Bridge up a little bit, just so he could get a better look at the closer edge of the frame. There was absolutely no good reason for Cal to snap, "Don't touch it," and try to yank it away from him.

Nikko was glaring at Cal, tightening his grip, even as Cal's hand came down on the other side of the Bridge, and as Nikko's palm settled into place against the handle there was an overpowering feeling of _rightness_ , a tongue sliding into a groove that had been made to fit it. And then it was like—it was like an overload, the light from the lab table and the scanners and the screens all flaring up until Nikko couldn't see past it or through it, until there was nothing but brilliant whiteness. Whiteness, and the memory of Cal's glare, and the feeling that Nikko's hand was—was touching someone else's, holding, except the only thing in his grip was the pale shining handle of the pyrite mirror.

It was _freaky_ , was what it was, and Nikko yanked his hand back, stumbled away, except it wasn't so much away as down, and everything went dark.

  


*

  


"Nikko? Nikko!" somebody said—Dad, Nikko thought, and that was Maggie taking his pulse, and this was really starting to get annoying.

"Man," Nikko said, "I'm getting kind of tired of this."

He blinked his eyes open in time to see Dad blow out a breath and settle back onto his heels, and to watch the worst of the concern ease out of Maggie's face, and—and there was someone else, Nikko felt sure, except Dad and Maggie were all he could see. Vincent was behind them somewhere, asking Cal gentle questions and shining a pen-light into his eyes—

Like, probably. Nikko couldn't actually see them. He was just hearing Vincent talk and—extrapolating. That was a thing.

Nikko blinked a couple more times and then tried to sit up, except Dad pressed a hand to his shoulder and pushed him back down. "Oh, come on, Dad, I'm fine!"

"So you keep telling me," Dad said. "Despite how this is the second time in a week I've had to carry you into Maggie's office."

Nikko scowled, because it wasn't _that_ funny, except—except Dad wasn't smiling, still all paternal and freaked out, and Maggie was the one pulling out a pen-light now.

Assuming Vincent had been before. Right. And why was—was _someone_ so freaking amused?

Nikko shook his head, irritable, and then shook it again, flinching, when Maggie flashed her light into his eyes. "No, seriously, I'm fine. I'm not dizzy or anything, I swear. My head doesn't even hurt." Which was true. His side ached a little, maybe because of how he'd landed when he'd fallen, but that was it.

"Yes, really," Cal was saying, somewhere behind Maggie; Nikko pushed at Dad's hand and managed to sit up far enough to see him over Maggie's shoulder, on the next cot over. Just like last time. They really did need to quit making a habit out of this. "Can I get back to work or what?"

It was basically the same thing Nikko had said—but Nikko wasn't the one who'd gotten a concussion, hypothermia, broken bones. (Even if they were just ribs. That counted.) Cal was the one they needed to be careful with—

Cal met Nikko's gaze, turning his head to do it like Nikko had made a noise or said something, except Nikko was pretty sure he hadn't. And there wasn't a look on his face or anything—his expression was weirdly blank, actually. But there was a—a _feeling_ coming from somewhere; it was somehow just sort of free-floating on the air, being carried past Nikko like the smell of oranges, flaring into his face like sunshine: surprise, sheepishness, tinged just slightly with a shadow of bitterness underneath.

It was there, unquestionable, and then it just slipped through Nikko's fingers. Except that was a stupid, annoying metaphor, because it wasn't _in_ his fingers. He'd have closed his hand around it if he could. But as it was, he was—it was like he'd been remembering a song, trying to hum it, and then three or four notes later just—lost the thread, whatever was left of the melody receding like tidewater and leaving him stranded.

Nikko had closed his eyes without realizing it, trying to chase after the sensation. He opened them again, and blinked: he was looking at Cal's elbow, Vincent's. Vincent had helped Cal up, and Cal was patting him on the shoulder, heading for the door. He wasn't looking at Nikko at all.

  


*

  


They'd been out for maybe half an hour, forty-five minutes—just long enough to make Dad freak, Nikko thought resentfully.

"Seriously, I'm okay! Maggie, tell him."

"You don't seem to be suffering any aftereffects, and as best I can tell, there's nothing wrong with you," Maggie allowed. " _But_ it's not a bad idea for you to take it easy for a couple of days."

"But Cal—"

"After what he's been through," Maggie said, "I'd be more surprised if he _weren't_ struggling to maintain a normal activity level. But if you're fine, then there's no good reason for you to be passing out."

Nikko opened his mouth and then closed it again.

"She's got you there, son," Dad said, smug, and then pushed the lab door open.

"But, _Dad_ —"

"Solomon!" Juliet said, and waved them over—Cal and Vincent were already standing behind her, looking at whatever she had pulled up on her screen. "I think I found something."

"Oh?" Dad said.

"I was thinking about what you said, about how we couldn't go back into the temple."

"Because it's too dangerous," Dad said, "and I'm not going to change my mind—"

"No, no, I know," Juliet said quickly. "But I don't think you have to." She motioned to her monitor, which was showing pictures—the pages of a book, one spread at a time, yellowed pages covered in scrawled handwriting. "Nikko said it was the Bridge that Dorna wanted, right? And they'd never found it. That was why they set this whole thing up, so we would go in and get it for them.

"So it occurred to me: whoever took the artifact or artifacts that should have been on or around the Bridge—it wasn't them. And why take those things and not the Bridge itself?" Juliet mimed incomprehension. "It doesn't make sense."

"But," Dad prompted.

"But," Juliet agreed, "I found something. The archives of the MNA—which we currently have access to; thank you, Vincent—happen to include the journals of Juan Olalde. He worked on several archaeological digs and reconstructions between 1920 and 1940, Chichén Itzá being the most famous. And I think the temple where the Bridge was located was one of them."

She paused and changed the image displaying on the screen, one spread and then a second, and the third one had a little sketch about halfway down the page: a neatly-drawn circle with a graceful curving frame, and two handles.

"He describes the location almost exactly. I think his team must have managed not to trip the temple's defenses, because he doesn't mention the puzzle room—"

Dad made an eloquent face.

"—but he _does_ describe the Bridge itself," Juliet added, "and apparently there was originally an enormous sastun on top of it."

"A what?" Nikko said, because nobody else seemed to be asking.

"Those jade spheres I told you about," Juliet said. "They're commonly found on or around pyrite mirrors, or at least they have been at other sites comparable to this one. But most of them are—I mean, the largest one ever found previous to this could fit comfortably in the palm of your hand. According to Sr. Olalde's description, this one was the size of his head, if not larger."

Dad had started leaning forward, face alight—Juliet had him now. He loved tracking stuff like this down. "And he lost it? Moved it? What?"

"The journal gets a little vague," Juliet admitted. "He says they couldn't be allowed to remain together, but doesn't say why—possibly he was already familiar with one or more legends regarding the Bridge, and didn't see any need to write them down. But it _does_ say where he took it." She swapped to another image: the writing was different on this spread, paired lines carefully spaced, and the letters were jumbled—even for Spanish or whatever, Nikko could tell there weren't enough vowels in the right spots. "Or at least I think it does."

"A cipher," Cal said, leaning forward. "That long ago—and without any tools or machines, he wouldn't have been expecting to need them ... Vigenère's about as complicated as he could get. There's enough text here that it shouldn't take too long to break."

"All right," Dad said, clapping his hands together. "Juliet, start packing up equipment—climbing, diving, whatever we've got. By the number of lines there, this'll be a bit of a treasure hunt, and I want to be prepared for anything. Cal, get started on that cipher. The second you crack the first clue, you tell me what it says and we get moving. I don't want anybody else getting their hands on this, and we know Dorna's around—once we get started, they're probably going to be right on our tails, so we need to be able to find this thing and then get out of there."

"Dad," Nikko said, and that was as far as he got before Dad rounded on him.

"Nope." Dad's tone was about as serious as it ever got, and his face might as well have been carved out of stone. Nikko's heart sank. "We need Cal or we can't read any of this—and if Sr. Olalde favored ciphers so much, there may be another waiting for us at the site." Dad raised his eyebrows. "You, as the other person who passed out after touching an ancient artifact, are staying here with Maggie in case she needs to run tests to help her figure out what happened. And Vincent's staying with you. If we're being watched, I don't want Dorna to see half the team leave and decide to take their shot at getting the Bridge back."

  


  


* * *

  


  


The fourth time Nikko huffed irritatedly, Vincent finally cracked an eye open. "It seems there's something troubling you," he said, equable.

"Uh, _yeah_ ," Nikko said, a little louder than he'd meant to.

Maggie had finally finished sticking him with needles and sent him on his way, and with everybody else gone there was nothing to do except try a few more of Vincent's weird exercises. Today was some kind of meditation gimmick. Which was about the last thing Nikko wanted to be doing, however badass mastering it had made Vincent.

Vincent raised an eyebrow inquiringly.

"It's not fair! Dad's totally overreacting, I can take care of myself. I mean, I got me and Cal out of that Dorna base, right? He doesn't even _realize_ how well I can take care of myself—"

Nikko caught himself and swallowed. Vincent's eyes had gone narrow.

"Is there something you want to tell me, Nikko?" Vincent said.

"What? No, I just—" Nikko stopped and sighed, and let himself relax out of the pose Vincent had coaxed him into, rubbing his hands over his eyes. "I just wish Dad didn't feel like he had to coddle me, I guess."

"You are his son," Vincent said. "Whatever else you are to him, whoever else you'll become, I think that will always be the first thing he sees when he looks at you."

"And I shouldn't get bent out of shape about it," Nikko concluded.

Vincent shrugged. "There are worse ways to handle being a father," he said quietly. "Yours does the best he can. Don't judge him too harshly."

Nikko sighed again. It sounded so straightforward when Vincent said it like that. Funny how hard it was to remember when he had Dad right in front of him. "Yeah, okay. So what do I do with my arms, again?"

Vincent reached out, and his hand was just about to close around Nikko's forearm when it happened: an awful lurching sensation that made Nikko feel like he was about to fall. _Not again_ , he thought, and the thought was utterly at odds with the cold white bolt of terror shooting through him, making the skin on his arms and shoulders and neck prickle up. _What the—?_

"Nikko? Nikko, if I need to radio Maggie—"

"No," Nikko managed to grit out, "no, it's—it's not me—"

"What?"

"It's _not me_ —it's—" The terror was turning into certainty, of a terrible, sickening kind; Nikko swallowed against it once and then again, bracing himself, and then reached for it, drowned in it, until he found what he was looking for. "It's _Cal_."

"Nikko," Vincent said, deliberately calm—careful, gentle. Patronizing, like Nikko was a skittish horse, because probably he just thought Nikko was going nuts.

"You don't understand." Nikko clutched at Vincent's hands, and was distantly surprised to realize his eyes were stinging. "You don't—please, we have to go. We have to go right now—"

"Nikko," Vincent said slowly. "I believe you. Do you hear me? I believe you."

Nikko squeezed his eyes shut and made himself nod. God, it was so hard to _think_ , the sense of fear and dread was overpowering.

"Come on, up you get. Let's see if Maggie can't raise Solomon on the radio."

Nikko hung on to Vincent's hands and went where he was led. The feeling of falling, or being about to, didn't go away—but it was more manageable when he was moving, when he had the feedback of his own body there to compete with the blaring disorientation coming from Cal.

"Maggie," Vincent called out, somewhere very far away, and then there was a gasp, another hand on Nikko's cheek, his neck. "He says something's wrong with Calvin."

"They did touch the Bridge at the same time," Maggie murmured, "and reacted to it in the same way. It's not entirely implausible that—"

"—a gap has indeed been bridged, as it were," Vincent agreed. "My thoughts exactly. Can you contact Solomon?"

"They went out of range twenty minutes ago," Maggie said. "But the trackers were still working at the moment they did—that location is in my logs."

"Well, then," Vincent said, wry. "I'll bring the car around."

  


*

  


Vincent drove. Given a choice, Nikko had opted to lie down in the back seat, with Maggie leaning back now and then from the passenger side to check on him.

They'd covered about two-thirds of the distance at what felt to Nikko like an unbearably slow crawl before Maggie raised a hand to her earpiece and said, "Solomon!"

"You've got him?" Vincent said.

Maggie pressed some button or other on the side of her earpiece and then pulled it out and held it over the center console; Dad's voice said tinnily, "What? What is it?"

Nikko wanted to shout at him, to scream, but there were so many things Dad didn't know that they just piled up in Nikko's throat, a logjam. Plus, he was a little bit busy clutching the car seat and trying to convince himself he hadn't just dropped a foot and a half, wasn't—swaying, dangling—

"Where are Cal and Juliet?" Vincent said.

"Back underground," Dad said, mild and a little confused. "We found the right spot—at least, we think we did—but it's too far for the radios to transmit out. I _was_ on my way back up to let Maggie know, but I didn't think I'd get anyone on the radio for another couple hundred meters at least—"

"You _left_ them?" Nikko burst out. "Dad—Dad, you have to go back, something's wrong—"

"Nikko?" Dad's voice went sharp. "You aren't supposed to be—Vincent, what happened? Did Dorna hit the house after we left?"

"Nothing's wrong with _me_! You have to go _back_ —"

"Stop," Vincent interrupted. "Nikko, calm down. Solomon, don't panic. We've nearly reached the entrance to the cave system, we'll be there in just a minute."

A minute—hah. Possibly it was, but it had to have been the longest minute ever. Nikko had his door open before the dirt had even finished spraying from underneath the braking wheels, and Dad was there at the cave entrance, looking bewildered. "Nikko—"

"Something's _wrong_ , Dad."

"Juliet and Cal were fine when I left them, Nikko—"

"And when was that?" Nikko demanded. "Twenty minutes ago? Half an hour? It only takes like _five_ minutes for something to go wrong, Dad, you know that—it only takes a _second_. We have to go, he's—he fell—"

Dad's face went startled and then grim. "There was a shaft," he said, "it was too narrow for me. And we thought whoever might have to pull the other person up shouldn't be somebody with cracked ribs. But—it was deep, Nikko—"

"He's _not_ dead," Nikko said, barely resisting the urge to grab Dad and shake him. "He's not dead, I'd know if he were."

Back to startled—but then Maggie said, "It's entirely possible that he would."

Dad raised his eyebrows, looked from Nikko to Maggie to Vincent. And whatever he saw must have been good enough, because he took Nikko by the shoulder and said, "This way."

  


*

  


If Nikko had thought the drive was interminable, it was nothing compared to the walk down. The cave seemed endless, and everything that was coming at him from Cal was only getting more vivid the closer they got—he stumbled three, four times, the impression that Cal was slipping getting more distinct each time, and it was so bad by the fourth time that Nikko was nearly running.

And then Dad's hand twitched up toward his radio; and Maggie's, still in her hand, suddenly spoke with Juliet's voice: "—don't even _think_ about it, do you understand me?"

"You can't do this forever," Cal said, very low. "Juliet—"

"If you unhook your harness from this cable," Juliet snapped, "I will climb down that shaft after you and _break whatever bones you have left_ ," and it was coming not just from Maggie's hand but from ahead of them, down the passage, around a corner—

For a moment, it all hung in front of Nikko like a perfect snapshot. The anchor for the climbing rope had given way, or the rock around it had, and so had whatever had been holding down the winch a few feet behind it; Juliet had caught the rope in between. She had braced herself as well as she could, but the cave floor around the shaft was mostly level, no spurs or juts of rock for her to wrap the rope around and no way for her to ease the amount of weight she was holding. Judging by the dark smear on the last foot or two of rope nearest her, her gloves had given up the ghost and it was starting to tear open her hands. She couldn't pull Cal back up now even if she tried. And the rope was starting to slide again—

Vincent and Dad both immediately went for the rope; but Nikko could feel it, the sickening lurch, Cal sliding again, the rock crumbling out from under his foot where he'd tried to brace it to help Juliet—the cool weight of the jade thing he was cradling in his hands, the sastun, and he could drop it, but would that even help? (Would Solomon forgive him? A find like this, and he'd throw it back down into obscurity to save his own stupid skin?) God, Juliet's hands—he had to do it, he had to do it now. Good thing he'd practiced so much before Antarctica; good thing Nikko wasn't here to insist on saving him anyway like an idiot—

Nikko dove for the lip of the shaft and just—closed his hands, _gripped_ , and when he had a grip—and he did; not with his hands or in any other way that made sense, but he could feel Cal's surprise, the sudden stability—he yanked. He pulled Cal back up through the shaft, slack cable dangling over the edge next to him, until he was looking Cal right in the eye. "Oh, I'll save you anyway," Nikko told him, and then set him down safely and let go.

  


  


* * *

  


  


There were two cars to drive back in. Dad and Cal and Juliet headed for the one they'd brought, Maggie going with them so she could get a head start on cleaning up Juliet's hands; and Nikko immediately shut himself up in the other one without actually speaking to anyone. Getting in the back would have been a little more chicken than Nikko wanted to be. But he kept his head down, his hands wrapped around each other in his lap, and he didn't look up when Vincent opened the door to get in the driver's seat.

Vincent was sort of scary and had pretended to snap Nikko's neck that one time, but was also kind of a gift: he didn't say anything. He drove Nikko all the way back to Campeche without a word.

When they parked, he didn't get out of the car right away. Nikko dared a glance, and found Vincent looking at him calmly. "It'll be all right."

Nikko snorted, rubbing at his eyes. "You don't know that. You don't even know—"

"It doesn't matter," Vincent said. "Your father loves you. You saved Cal's life. And if you are in any danger because of what you have been given, you have a team of some of the best people in the world at your back. It'll be all right."

  


*

  


Everybody ended up in Maggie's office—watching her finish up with taking care of Juliet's hands. Vincent herded Nikko in, and everyone who was already there looked at him at once, which didn't really help with the urge to run away.

But then Maggie looked back down at Juliet's palm again, pressing a square of gauze into place, and said, "I assume you'd tell me if you'd passed out again on the drive back?"

Nikko cleared his throat and then shrugged. "Vincent would," he said, "the snitch."

"I feel like I ought to be yelling at you," Dad said, "but frankly I'm not even sure where to start. You can read Cal's mind?"

"Not really," Nikko said, and then grimaced when Dad raised his eyebrows. "Or—um, only sort of."

"It's not just him," Cal said.

"Excuse me?"

Cal met Dad's gaze and then looked away. "It's not a one-way thing."

"And you didn't _say_ anything?"

Dad wasn't mad so much as surprised, Nikko knew, but Cal still flinched a little bit, and without thinking Nikko took a step forward, drawing Dad's attention away again. "No, Dad, it's—it isn't like you're thinking. It's pretty hard to tell. I knew something was weird, that I was—picking up stuff, but I didn't figure out it was Cal until he fell."

Dad looked up at the ceiling for a second, like he thought somebody up there might just pop down and explain things to his satisfaction, and then he blew out a long breath. "Okay," he said. "Okay. And you," and he turned back to Cal, "you have the telekinesis, too?"

Cal's gaze snapped to Nikko, a blackness like storm clouds passing over his face; and then it cleared again and he looked away.

"No," Nikko made himself say. "No, that's just me. And that isn't—the psychic thing is the Bridge, probably. The telekinesis isn't."

"And how do you know that?" Dad said, because of course he did.

"Because," Nikko said, "I've had it since before we found the Bridge."

Dad stared at him, agog. "You—what? Since _when_? Why didn't you say anything?"

Nikko blinked. He'd expected—he didn't know what. Maybe for Dad to just kind of _know_. Like the second Dad learned Nikko had been hiding things from him at all, he'd also know how much, and for how long, and why. But he didn't.

He didn't.

Nikko wet his lips, and then, casual, shrugged. "I don't know. I didn't really know how to use it—I still don't. It only happened a couple times. I thought maybe it was just going to go away again or something. The first time all I moved was a soda can, I didn't really even know what I could do with it—"

His teeth snapped shut over the end of the last word, his jaw clenching; for a split second, he was so overwhelmingly _furious_ that he could barely even see straight. He wanted to _punch_ —

—who? Nikko shook himself and reoriented. _He_ wasn't angry. He wasn't mad at anybody, which meant it was Cal, not him. And Cal—Nikko checked. Cal wasn't looking at him; Cal wasn't looking at anybody. Cal was staring down at the cot next to Juliet like he wanted to set it on fire, and Nikko could see the way the muscles in his jaw were working.

"Well," Vincent said, "we'll have to test it and see. Plenty of time for that later. Maggie—will her hands be all right?"

Seriously, dude was a gift. Everybody else refocused, Dad looking a little guilty over not having been the one to ask; and Nikko waited just long enough to hear the beginning of Maggie's answer—"Yes, I think so. No serious damage to the ligaments or tendons ..."—before he slipped out the door.

  


*

  


Nikko went all the way up the stairs and out onto the roof. There was no point worrying that Cal wouldn't find him, after all, and if Cal was that mad, they were probably going to end up screaming at each other. Might as well do it out here.

He settled down by the edge of the roof with his legs folded up, elbows on his knees, and looked out. It really was a nice view: lots of pale buildings, a few churchtowers a little further away, streetlights just starting to come on here and there. The sun was almost gone in the west, the Gulf on fire to the east. Nice.

"You wanted to talk?"

Nikko turned to look over his shoulder. Cal was standing a few steps away, arms folded, face opaque—and they were psychic now, but somehow that wasn't really helping Nikko tell what the hell he was thinking. The anger was coming through loud and clear, but not the reason _why_. And maybe Cal was pissed about this whole brain-link thing, but they'd both touched the Bridge, he couldn't really blame Nikko for that. The worst thing Nikko had done since then was save his stupid life. What did he even have to be mad about?

"I don't know, man," Nikko said, as conversational as he could make it, and shrugged a shoulder. "Somehow I got the idea there was something on your mind."

Cal made a harsh, unhappy noise. "I should've known. I should've known it would be like this with you, stupid psychic jokes—you never take anything seriously—"

Any other day, Nikko would have laughed, would even have agreed, and then would have mocked Cal for expecting him to. But the memory of panicking, the wild fear he'd felt, pushing Vincent and Maggie to move faster, _knowing_ there was something horribly wrong and not being sure he'd get there fast enough to do anything—that he'd used the telekinesis in the Dorna base at all just because somebody had been headed toward Cal with a knife, just because he couldn't _not_ take that seriously—

It was too much. It struck too close to the heart of something Nikko had been spending a lot of time trying really hard not to think about. ( _Especially_ given that he and Cal were now joined at the brain.) And Cal didn't know that, he couldn't, but all the same it stung to hear him dismiss it like that. It stung to have him sound like he thought Nikko wasn't capable of it, like he thought less of Nikko because of something that wasn't even true.

And suddenly Cal wasn't the only one who was pissed off.

Nikko smiled—not kindly. "What," he said, "is this because I showed you up again? Because I saved your life, _twice_ , with my own personal grab bag of superpowers—what are you, jealous? Seems a little petty for the oh-so-mature Mr. Banks—"

"Screw you," Cal ground out. "You _lied_."

"What, to Dad? I don't see how that's any of your business—"

"Bullshit!" Cal snapped. "You knew exactly what you could do with it once you got us away from Dorna, and I _saw_ you, and you _still_ lied. You lied to—"

— _to **me**_ , he didn't say, and whether the fact that Nikko heard it anyway was down to the psychic thing or just because it made sense was anybody's guess.

And that was—that was the last thing Nikko had been expecting. That was the last reason he would have thought Cal would be this angry with him, and sheer surprise kept him silent.

Cal didn't say anything else, either. He still had his arms crossed over his chest, but it looked less like he was mad and more like he was kind of cold, now. He looked down and scuffed a foot against the roof, and the way the light was hitting his face, the angle and the sunset-vivid colors of it, made him look strange and inscrutable, like someone Nikko didn't know at all.

"It doesn't matter," Cal said after a minute, low. "I shouldn't have expected any different. We've never liked each other, never trusted each other. We were never really friends anyway."

His voice was quiet, but rough enough to make it still sound kind of pissy. Except what Nikko was feeling from him wasn't like before, wasn't anger so much as it was—

 _Hurt_ , Nikko thought, suddenly able to identify the sting of it, the hot sharp jerk in his chest. But it had taken him a moment too long to do it: Cal was already turning around, walking away, and Nikko couldn't find the words to stop him.

  


* * *

  


**PART III: ONE MIND**

  


* * *

  


It wasn't like this was the first time Nikko and Cal quit speaking to each other. It wasn't even the longest stretch—the time Cal had thrown away all Nikko's copies of _Mad_ had taken on certain qualities not unlike nuclear winter. Compared to that, not talking to Cal for a day and a half was barely a blip on the radar.

So it wasn't that Nikko felt especially bad about it—honestly, it was probably for the best that he had a chance to get his head together before he had to talk to Cal out loud again. And it wasn't that he couldn't handle it. It was just so much harder to _concentrate_ on anything with Cal's little jabs of resentment poking Nikko in the side all day long, with the ebb and flow of Cal swinging from resignation to frustration to unhappiness always there in the background. But nothing _useful_ , none of his actual thoughts or anything that might really help Nikko sort this out—oh, no. Nothing like that. Because God forbid that anything could ever be easy with Cal—

"Nikko?"

"Yeah, what? Sorry, yes. I'm listening."

Juliet raised an eyebrow at him, but didn't tell him he was full of it. "There are actually several references in the journal text that back up this interpretation of the inscriptions on the Bridge," she said instead, and then flipped through what were probably the images of those pages on her monitor. "Combined with Sr. Olalde's insistence on separating the two artifacts to help keep them from being used by the wrong people, it seems pretty clear that the Bridge is intended to facilitate the sastun's function."

"Which is super useful to you," Nikko said, "if you want to ... ?"

"Well, that's the question," Juliet admitted, looking a little sheepish. "Like I told you before, the traditional use of a sastun is for scrying, prophecy—for looking into the past, present, and supposedly the future. But it seems obvious that this one is unusual in some way. Whether that's because it's simply more powerful or because it actually does something different from the others is impossible to determine." She pulled up a different image—this one was a closeup of the frame of the Bridge, and it was centered on a pretty clear pictograph. Two figures, arms out: each was grasping one end of a shape that looked a lot like the Bridge in miniature, and then in the next pictograph over, their other hands were lowered onto the surface of a perfectly round circle. "As best I can tell," Juliet added, "using the Bridge first is supposed to make it—um, safe."

"Well, that's promising," Dad said.

"Oh, come on, Dad," Nikko said, "Maggie's right here! Who else were you planning to psychically link up to test this thing?"

"No one," Dad said, pointed, "I was planning on _no one_ —"

"—but, oh, look, that's no longer an option!" Nikko said brightly. "Besides, for all you know it wouldn't even work a second time. Maybe it has to be—I don't know, the second Wednesday after the full moon, or the planets have to be aligned with Mars in retrograde, or who knows what. Either way, we're right here. It might as well be us."

Cal said nothing—which at least meant he didn't disagree. Probably.

"And," Nikko added, "don't try to tell me you don't want to know what this thing does."

Dad sighed and looked away, which was totally a yes. "I do," Dad conceded, "of course I do—but not at the cost of anybody's life, Nikko—"

"The whole point of the Bridge existing is so we _won't_ get hurt," Nikko said.

Dad looked at Vincent.

"The only way to know," Vincent murmured, "is to try."

"Okay, but I don't like trying on my own kid," Dad replied, rubbing his eyes; and then he sighed. "Fine. But Maggie stays right beside you, you listen to my instructions, and if anything, _anything_ seems strange or looks like it's hurting you, we're pulling your hands away. We are not taking chances with this thing. Understand?"

"Yes, Dad," Nikko said.

Dad turned the laser eyes on Cal—who felt a little startled, Nikko thought. Probably just because he was a little too responsible to get the laser eyes much. Wasn't used to it.

Cal nodded.

"You boys be careful."

"We're always careful, Dad."

Dad gave him a pretty impressive hairy eyeball, unmoved. "Don't think I don't remember the last time you said that," he said.

  


*

  


The Bridge had already made the two of them fall over, and the sastun seemed to be _more_ powerful rather than less; so Dad decreed that it was going on the floor, and Nikko and Cal were going to sit down before they touched it. Which was going to look a lot less cool, but Cal didn't really need any more chances to get a second concussion.

Maggie was on Cal's side of the sastun, because concussion, and so was Vincent, with Dad and Juliet on Nikko's. So Nikko ended up meeting Cal's eyes for the first time since the roof with four people staring at them both intently. Awesome.

"Ready?" he said.

Cal looked at him silently, unbending, and then placed his hand palm-down against the sastun. Which presumably was a yes.

"Right," Nikko said, and set his hand down on the other side.

For a moment, nothing happened. The surface of the jade sphere was cool against his palm and ridiculously smooth. He was struck by an urge to slide his hand across it—but between the instant the thought crossed his mind and his hand actually moving, everything changed.

He didn't close his eyes, or at least he didn't think he had, but suddenly he just wasn't—wasn't _seeing_ things anymore, wasn't looking at them with his eyes. Last time, with the Bridge, he'd told himself it had looked like the lights flaring all around him, like his vision whiting out. But this time he was ready. This time he was paying attention.

There was a space but there wasn't—it was interior somehow, a space the same way your mind's eye was a picture, real without being physical. And there was that same sense of a presence. Not a hand Nikko was holding this time—which was good, because now that he knew it was Cal, that would've been weird and embarrassing. It was just that there was someone else there, that Nikko could tell as clearly as if he'd actually been able to look.

Then, after a moment, Nikko became aware that there was a third something. A third something that was fundamentally _different_. Cal in here was weird all by itself, another person where Nikko was used to only having himself—still a person, though, a human, and he thought like a human and breathed like a human and felt like a human. But the third presence was a whole new order of magnitude, a huge strange opaque _thing_ , an awareness so differently organized Nikko could barely even get a grip on it.

And this thing—the sastun?—wasn't holding hands with anybody. It was a lock they were sliding two keys into, maybe, or an outlet with two plugs; Nikko was dimly aware that his brain was scrambling for a familiar sensation to process this whole thing as. And—

And something was wrong. The keys were jamming—the plugs were half-in but the current was too strong, the whole outlet spewing sparks, Nikko's fingers buzzing with it—

Nikko reeled back—he had a body to reel back in, he had actual hands instead of just visualizations. He was in a real room with lights and a floor, and Dad's hands were hard on his shoulders, and there was something happening. A taste? A smell? A _sound_ —and when he thought that, everything snapped back into place and he could hear Dad shouting his name.

Nikko sputtered out a breath and then coughed. He had to—there was something weird in his mouth, bleh, and sticky on his face, hot and liquid in his ears—

"Nikko!"

"Yeah, sorry," Nikko rasped, "sorry," and then raised a hand dazedly to wipe the blood away from under his nose, and where it was trickling down the side of his neck. "It's fine, I'm fine."

"There's blood coming out of your face," Dad said, "so forgive me if I don't take your word for it—"

"Aw, c'mon," Nikko said. "I didn't even pass out this time."

  


*

  


He hadn't, and neither had Cal. Cal wasn't even bleeding that much—it was Nikko who'd gotten the worst of it this time.

"I'd have to do scans to be sure," Maggie said, "but at this point, as best I can tell, they're both all right."

Dad blew out a breath in relief, and then, switching gears, rounded on Juliet. "I thought the Bridge was supposed to make it _safe_."

"That _was_ safe," Juliet protested.

"Uh, I had blood coming out of my ears," Nikko said.

Juliet grimaced, apologetic, but then started to shake her head anyway. "No," she said, "I mean—" She went for her monitor, tilting it so everyone could see, and pulled up another closeup of the Bridge's frame.

Nikko squinted at it, trying to figure out what the hell that pictograph was supposed to mean, and then all at once it came together. He couldn't help a flinch.

"I mean people who _don't_ use the Bridge can apparently expect their heads to explode," Juliet said. "I'm pretty sure it did its job."

There was a moment of silence, as presumably all of them tried not to picture Nikko's and Cal's heads splattering all over the lab.

"Fair enough," Vincent said, "but presumably this isn't the desired result, either."

"No," Juliet admitted. "No, I—I don't think so. And frankly I'm not sure what else we're supposed to do. The images show two people touching the Bridge, exactly like Nikko and Cal did. And then it says that they're—once they're joined, of one mind, of one heart—"

It was perfectly average mystical nonsense, but Nikko cringed anyway. _Of one heart_ , he wasn't going to touch with a ten-foot pole, but _of one mind_ wasn't really any better. As if he'd ever been of one mind with Cal on anything ever. Hadn't he just been thinking not half an hour ago that even the psychic thing wasn't actually doing squat to help him understand Cal better? And now this. It was like the inscription was mocking him: _hey, the one thing you need to make this work? Also the one thing you're completely incapable of! SUCKER._

Nikko snorted under his breath, shaking his head, and then had to brace himself against another wave of discontent from Cal, with an undertow of sucking frustration. Jesus, that was so annoying—like Nikko wasn't frustrated enough himself, he had to feel Cal's irritation on top of it.

Vincent cleared his throat, and Nikko realized he'd started glaring at Cal and quickly looked away.

"I don't suppose there's anything preventing you two from seeing eye to eye," Vincent said, in a contemplative kind of tone. "Some sort of—unresolved conflict between you."

"What? Hah, no. Nope."

Vincent raised an eyebrow.

"Can't think of anything," Cal agreed, flat. "Look, Maggie, if we're really all right, then there's some transcriptions I should finish up—"

"Yes, yeah, and I've got—homework," Nikko stumbled. "From yesterday. Better go—yeah." And he matched actions to words and got the hell out of the lab before Vincent or Dad or anybody else could stop him.

  


  


* * *

  


  


Of course, Vincent had probably tracked—oh, who even knew, a mountain goat over twenty miles of bare rock, that kind of thing. Like, while on vacation, to relax. As a birthday present to himself.

So it wasn't exactly a surprise that he was able to find Nikko on the roof.

And Nikko wasn't even unhappy to see him. Not that Nikko especially wanted to talk to anybody about Cal; but he'd been staring at this same stupid paragraph about coefficients of friction for like forty-five minutes.

So Nikko gave in and looked up, and Vincent took the cue for what it was and said, mild, "Thought you might like to take a break."

Nikko made a skeptical face at him.

Vincent shrugged. "We haven't yet made any attempt to integrate your telekinesis into your hand-to-hand combat work. It occurred to me that you might like to give that a try."

Yeah. Right.

But conversational chess with Vincent was better than coefficients of friction.

"Okay," Nikko conceded.

The thing about Vincent was that even when you knew he was messing with you, it was still almost impossible to not fall for it. Vincent was smart. He didn't push right away. He didn't ask any questions. He let Nikko put his books away, and then they went down to the exercise room, which was smaller in the office in Campeche but still had plenty of space to move. He had them do exactly what he'd said they would do—to make it seem less like a trick, to give Nikko a chance to warm up and stop thinking and relax. And even though Nikko knew that was why, he still did it, because he _wanted_ to stop thinking; he _wanted_ to relax.

Besides, it was kind of fun pushing Vincent around with the telekinesis: lifting him off the floor, shoving him backward or side-to-side, watching his eyebrows go up as he tried to figure out how to counter or evade. Vincent, who Nikko couldn't usually surprise at all—and putting himself at a disadvantage was probably just another part of the trick, so Nikko would feel less defensive, but it was still kind of awesome.

After a little while, they both started to get the hang of it. Vincent couldn't do much of anything when Nikko just sort of _gripped_ , the way he had when he was pulling Cal up in the cave. But if he moved with the pushes and shoves instead of against them, Nikko kind of lost track of him, and then he could drop out from underneath the push or dodge around it.

Then he stopped to correct Nikko's form a little, and—of course—that was when he said it.

"So. What exactly is the problem between you and Cal?"

"I thought we weren't going to talk about that," Nikko said, resigned. He couldn't even really muster any irritation toward Vincent. He'd seen the trap coming and he'd stepped into it anyway, he had nobody to blame but himself.

"I never said that," Vincent said.

"It was implied," Nikko muttered.

Vincent just looked at him expectantly, untroubled.

Nikko sighed. "Look, maybe this Bridge thing just isn't going to work for us the way it's supposed to. We touched it at the same time, yeah, but that was an accident. Maybe that's not how you're supposed to do it. Maybe you're both supposed to be prepared for it somehow, you're supposed to be 'one mind' already—maybe you're supposed to say 'abracadabra' five times fast. Who knows."

"Maybe," Vincent said, ominously agreeable. "Or maybe you both simply need to be aware that the Bridge can't do all the work for you."

Nikko rolled his eyes, but not as sharply as he could have. "Yeah, fine, go ahead. Enlighten me."

Vincent's expression turned courteously clueless: like he didn't understand why Nikko was being so hostile, but was of course happy to oblige. It was almost perfect, except for the way his mouth was quirking up at one side. "When Cal fell," Vincent said, "you knew that he was afraid, that he was in danger; but you didn't know why. Now you are—at odds, and I'm guessing you don't know why. At least not entirely."

"Yeah?"

"If you fully understood each other," Vincent said gently, "then you would not be at odds. Not truly. And," he added, raising his eyebrows again, "I imagine you would also feel less frustrated."

"You think so, huh," Nikko said.

"I do," Vincent murmured, and then he paused. "I left Dorna to follow your father, Nikko; but that wasn't all I had to do. It took a great deal of hard work for both of us before your father was able to trust me. You and Cal, you've used the Bridge—but that may not be all you have to do." He stepped back, eyed Nikko for a long moment, and then added, bland, "Elbows up. You never remember that."

  


*

  


That seemed to be everything Vincent had wanted to say. They smacked each other around for a little while and then tested the telekinesis a couple new ways; and then Vincent handed him a bottle of water and told him to go finish his homework.

Nikko hadn't felt especially thirsty, but half the bottle was gone by the time he made it up to his room. Why was Vincent always right about everything? He looked at the water bottle balefully, wiping his mouth, and then almost threw it at Dad, who was sitting on the couch like a creep waiting for him.

"Jesus, Dad!"

"Whoa, hey, sorry," Dad said, holding his hands up defensively. "I figured you'd be coming back for this stuff," and he motioned to Nikko's books, "at some point, and I wanted to talk to you."

"Oh my god," Nikko groaned, "not you, too—"

"I just want to make sure you aren't going to try anything stupid," Dad said.

Thank God. Talking to Dad about Cal was basically Nikko's worst nightmare. "Stupid?" Nikko echoed.

Dad gave him a flat look.

"There are a lot of stupid things I could be planning to try, Dad. If you have anything particular in mind, you need to be a little more specific."

"Well, now that you've struck terror into my heart," Dad said dryly, "I actually feel like I should be less specific. Don't do _anything_ stupid on purpose, Nikko."

Nikko waved a hand, motioning for Dad to get on with it. "But especially not ... ?"

"But especially not anything where you mess with that sastun on your own," Dad said. "Just because it's not working with you and Cal doesn't mean it'll work any better with just you."

"Yeah," Nikko said, "I saw the little Aztec guy's eyeballs popping out, too, Dad." He mimed the expression on the pictograph's subject, the one right before the pictograph with all the stylized waves of blood pouring out of the guy's newly headless neck; and Dad snorted. "I get the picture."

"Just making sure," Dad repeated, but he was smiling this time. He stood up and clapped Nikko on the shoulder, and then paused for a second. "I guess I should also say I don't want you and Cal trying that again without Maggie there. But the way you two were looking earlier, it seems like maybe I don't have to worry about that."

" _Dad_ ," Nikko said. "Did Vincent put you up to this?"

"What? No," Dad said, and he looked so clueless that it was probably the truth. "Why?"

Nikko sighed and shrugged Dad's hand off so he could throw himself down onto the couch instead. "Come on, you heard him in the lab. He thinks that thing isn't going to work until Cal and I—hug it out or something, I don't know."

"Ah," Dad said. "Is that so."

"Yeah." Nikko paused for another gulp of water, and then carefully screwed the cap back onto the bottle, which happened to make it so he wasn't looking at Dad. Handily enough. "But I just—I don't know how to—" Nikko shook his head, irritated. "Cal's so _stubborn_."

Dad made an exaggerated face, eyes and mouth round with concern and surprise. Nikko thought about throwing the water bottle at him, for real this time. "Oh, yeah," Dad said, "wow, I can see how that might get on your nerves really quickly, when somebody's stubborn and they won't listen to you a lot of the time and—"

"Yes, okay, Dad, I get the point. It's not just him," Nikko admitted. "It's—I could probably stand to apologize to him. And I should stop looking for ways to make this his fault and start trying to figure out what to say when I do."

Dad grinned at him, warm and just a little smug, and then tilted his hands. "Hey—you said it, not me. But," he added, faux-thoughtful, "now that you mention it, that does sound like a pretty good place to start."

  


*

  


Normally, Nikko might say he'd take being captured by Dorna and nearly freezing to death over the prospect of apologizing to Cal after an argument. But recent events suggested that would have been a big fat lie. Being captured by Dorna and nearly freezing to death? Sucked. Whereas Nikko was starting to feel like he was sort of okay with the idea of apologizing to Cal, if he could just figure out how to do it.

But—unlike being captured by Dorna, or nearly freezing to death; separately, and also together—Nikko didn't have a whole lot of practice with it.

Vincent would just do his little Mona Lisa smile thing and tell Nikko to think about it, or that it needed to come from the heart and so Vincent couldn't tell him what to say. Something profound that also meant Vincent didn't have to help. And Dad—yeah, no. Dad had already gotten about as much input into all this as Nikko wanted him to have.

So after showering the worst of the sweat off, drinking the rest of the water, and staring at coefficients of friction a little longer, Nikko snuck back down to the lab. A quick peek through the glass door confirmed that Cal wasn't there, which meant Nikko could sidle up to Juliet's desk and clear his throat.

Juliet looked up from her computer—more closeups from the Bridge's frame, it looked like—and raised her eyebrows. "Oh, hey, Nikko," she said. "I was just about to go looking for you."

Nikko blinked, wrongfooted. "Yeah?"

Juliet motioned to the screen. "Good news—it isn't permanent."

"What?"

"The link," Juliet clarified. "The whole psychic-mind-bridge thing. I'm not sure yet, I don't have the whole thing translated. But I think this side explains how to undo it."

"Oh," Nikko said.

Juliet narrowed her eyes at him. "That doesn't sound as jubilant as I was expecting."

"What? No, hey, that's good. That's great," Nikko fumbled. He wasn't even sure _why_ he was fumbling—it was nice to think there was an off switch, a safety net. Even if Cal was mad at Nikko forever, Nikko wouldn't necessarily have to _feel_ it. That was good.

It was just—he wasn't sure. He'd been relying on it, in a weird way. It wasn't all that invasive: he'd only gotten actual thoughts out of Cal the once, in the cave, when he'd been half out of his head and so had Cal. It was just enough to cheat a little. Cal couldn't claim he wasn't still angry, not when Nikko could feel that he was. And Nikko—

Nikko couldn't claim to not be sorry, either. Though if Cal wasn't paying attention, he might not have noticed that just yet.

"Mm." Juliet was looking at Nikko with a sort of uncomfortable amount of focus, now, and her eyebrows had gone up a little. "So what did you want, anyway?"

"Oh, I, well," Nikko said, and coughed. "So, uh, you've known Cal for a long time."

"So have you," she said.

"Well, yeah," Nikko said. "But you've known him longer."

Juliet's eyebrows went higher. "So stipulated," she agreed. "But I've never been psychically linked to him, so I don't how much I can help you there."

Nikko jittered there helplessly for a moment, shifting his weight from foot to foot, and then finally gave in and sat down in the chair next to Juliet's workstation. "It really isn't all that much use," Nikko said. "I still screwed up. And I don't—I'm not sure what to do."

Juliet looked at him for a second, and then swiveled her chair around so she was facing him. He'd set his hands against the edge of her desk, loose fists, and she reached out and put her hands over them and said, very intently, "Nikko. I know it may seem like it sometimes, but Cal is not an alien. Or some kind of—mythological creature. If you upset him and you're sorry about it, all you have to do is say so. And if it's something you can't be sorry for, then tell him why and talk it out. It's not like there's incantations you just need to say in the right order—"

"No, I—I know that," Nikko insisted. He looked down at the backs of her hands: they were still all wrapped up, the bandages over her palms scratchy against his fingers. He remembered the way her voice had sounded over the radio in the cave, _don't even **think** about it_ , even though her hands must have already been tearing open. She cared about Cal, too. She had to understand that Nikko just didn't want to mess this up.

Juliet's gaze was unbearably kind for a long moment, and then she leaned back and grinned at him. "What, were you hoping I'd say, 'just keep alternately ignoring him and pretending nothing's wrong, that always worked for me'?"

Nikko let out a little groan and bent forward until he could rest his head against the desk. "Maybe," he told it.

"You'll figure it out," Juliet said, comforting.

Some things were easier to say to the desk than to Juliet. "What if we can't?" Nikko asked it.

"Nikko," Juliet said, and then nothing else, until Nikko reluctantly straightened up again and met her eyes. "You're both smart, good people who value the truth. And this matters to you. You'll figure it out."

"Yeah, okay."

Juliet smiled, and then flapped a hand at him. "Now get off my desk," she said, "I've got work to do."

  


*

  


He had to go find Cal. To tell him about undoing the psychic thing, if nothing else, because Cal deserved to know that was an option.

He had to, but he didn't _want_ to. Or he did, but was also kind of dreading it. Whatever, emotions were complicated.

He could probably have tried reaching for Cal, in that weird way that wasn't actually reaching, but then if he could actually tell where Cal was, he'd be out of excuses. So instead he bobbled uncertainly from the lab toward the front door, and then back; and then, after a moment, into Maggie's office, which was conveniently halfway between the two.

The medical cots were all folded away, and it looked more like a workspace now than a hospital room. Maggie was going through what were probably his and Cal's scan results—a few more near-concussions or psychic accidents, Nikko thought, and he was going to be able to recognize his own brain on there.

She looked over her shoulder at the sound of the door, and her face softened—not the doctor look anymore, but the Maggie look. "Don't tell me Solomon's decided it's time for another test," she said.

"No, no," Nikko said. "Dad doesn't want us messing with the sastun again unless we're pretty sure there won't be any blood."

"Probably for the best," Maggie said.

"Yeah. It's—Vincent thinks it's because Cal and I aren't—communicating properly," Nikko confessed. "That being psychic isn't everything."

"Oh?"

"Yeah. Dad thinks so, too," Nikko added, scuffing a foot against the floor. "Juliet says I just need to go talk to him."

He risked a glance up: Maggie was smiling at him, steady and fond, eyes warm, even though it wasn't like he'd said anything funny. "I see," she said. "And would you like to know what I think?"

Nikko shrugged a shoulder.

"I think," Maggie said, "that you've talked to everyone in this building about Calvin Banks. Except for Calvin Banks."

Oh.

"That—pretty much covers it, yeah," Nikko said, sheepish.

"You don't need any advice from me," Maggie added, gentle. "You already know what you should do."

"Yeah. I guess I do."

  


  


* * *

  


  


In the end, it turned out Cal was on the roof. Nikko didn't even need to push very hard to figure it out—if Cal wasn't in the lab, and wasn't in Maggie's office getting a checkup on his ribs, then he was either in his own room or outside. Nikko stood in the hallway with his eyes closed and thought about meditating with Vincent, making himself still, so the only thing left inside him would be whatever was coming from Cal.

And what filtered to the top of his awareness, after a minute, was a quiet sort of unhappiness, mingling around the edges with a soft wistful pleasure in—in loveliness, in the feeling of a warm breeze and the ability to look out over water.

Definitely the roof.

Nikko climbed up and then just stood there for a minute, looking. Cal was sitting near the edge—actually, Cal was sitting almost exactly where Nikko had been sitting while they'd fought. Nikko wondered whether he realized it.

He walked over, and he didn't bother stepping carefully, so Cal could hear him coming. Cal didn't move, didn't look up or say anything; and after a moment Nikko sat down, cleared his throat and said, "Hey."

"Hey," Cal said, and it would have been mocking if it hadn't been so flat.

Nikko grimaced—that really wasn't a promising start. But, hey, nobody was shouting yet. "So I have this whole big conversation in mind," he forged on, "but there's something I should tell you first."

Cal didn't look _at_ him. But he turned his face sort of more toward Nikko's general direction, and his eyebrows went up.

"Juliet's pretty sure we can undo this," Nikko said, and waved a hand back and forth a little awkwardly between them. "Like, the psychic thing. Or at least she's close to figuring it out."

"And you want to," Cal said, without inflection.

"Not especially," Nikko said.

That, finally, got Cal to look at him; and Nikko thought about how it must have sounded and felt his cheeks get a little hot.

"I mean, uh. It's. I kind of think we could use the help," Nikko admitted, rubbing a hand over the back of his neck.

"For that big conversation you've got planned."

"Yeah. But if you'd rather we got rid of it first and then talked—" Nikko shrugged. "That's okay. We can wait for Juliet instead."

Cal was still looking at him, dark-eyed, expressionless; and all Nikko was getting from him was a sort of stillness—stillness like being on the edge of something, like balancing so you wouldn't tip off. "No," he said, after a moment.

"Man, you have got to give me more than that," Nikko said.

Cal's mouth twitched—not actually a smile, but it was the closest thing Nikko had seen on him in days. "No," he repeated, a little wryly. "You're right. We could use the help."

Nikko grinned at him, relieved; and then it occurred to him that he'd just guaranteed that Cal would be able to tell exactly how relieved, and he coughed and looked away. "So—uh. So it's been pointed out to me that I've been avoiding you, and annoying you, and getting accidentally psychically bonded to you, but maybe not so much actually talking to you."

"Yeah?" Cal said.

"Yeah. And I get that you're mad at me—and I did lie to you," Nikko added hurriedly, "and that's totally fair. I just—I have to tell you, man, I was sort of surprised by _how_ mad. Like, you don't usually try to set me on fire with your eyes unless I've done something really awful. Like leave my wet towel on the floor in the hotel bathroom."

Cal snorted—score!—and then shook his head. He was still sitting all wrapped up, knees bent and his arms protectively around them; but his shoulders relaxed a little, and the sense of defensiveness coming from him eased off. "It's possible that I was a little freaked out," he said, and then he hesitated. But he wasn't closing up again, Nikko could feel that—he just needed a second. "When we went to Château Rene, for the Ring of Truth? I saw—I mean, I know it messed with all of us. More Juliet than me, even. But I still saw stuff that wasn't there. And then I couldn't figure out how you'd thrown that Dorna guy across the room without moving, and then the keys—"

"Oh, uh, yeah," Nikko said. "The thing about the keys jumping into my hand, that—happened."

"Yeah, I kind of figured that out," Cal said, and it was dry as dust, but he wasn't angry. "And then this thing with the Bridge, feeling all this stuff that wasn't mine. I have to tell you, man, I thought—"

"What?"

Cal shrugged, a little stiffly. "I thought I was going crazy," he admitted. "You were—you seemed so sure nothing weird had happened in the Dorna base, and I know they hit me in the head, but I _saw_ —"

His voice was pretty level, but the way Nikko's stomach tightened, the cold skittering feeling that crept through him from Cal, gave it the lie. "You did see, man," Nikko said quickly, "you did, I'm—I never meant for you to think—" because he _hadn't_ , Jesus, he'd just thought Cal would decide it was the concussion and leave it at that—

"No, I know that," Cal conceded. "I just—it scared me. And then you used it to save me in front of everybody, and you were so casual about it afterward, and then you lied _again_ , like it didn't even matter."

"I didn't—"

Cal looked at him with sudden intensity, inexorable, and a shadow of the same vicious anger that had ground Nikko's teeth together in the lab reared up. "Don't bullshit me," Cal snapped. "Not _me_. You know what you can do with it. You made Vincent bring you to the cave because you knew I was in trouble, you knew you could pull me up. Quit trying to pretend like it's just some party trick—"

"It scares me," Nikko blurted.

Cal stopped in a flare of startlement—it was getting a little easier to tell what he was feeling, Nikko thought, and very carefully didn't look at him.

"It's—I—" Nikko blew out a breath and tried to figure out where to start. "You remember that thing with the Tungus?"

"The scorpion thing," Cal said obligingly. "You got better."

Nikko bit his lip. Was he really going to tell Cal? Except—except he kind of had to. Cal would be feeling Nikko trying to decide, and he'd know if Nikko lied to him.

Nikko had thought he'd wanted to keep on being psychic because it would help him with Cal. But maybe, subconsciously, he'd also known himself well enough to tell that this was the only way it was going to come out. This was the only way he could keep himself from just brushing everything off.

"I didn't," he made himself say. "I haven't even told Dad this, but I didn't. They took me to the place where that magic spring was supposed to be, and they thought it wasn't there anymore, but it was. The water was just coming up in a different spot, Cal.

"And I know I had a fever of like a hundred and six, okay, but I'm telling you, I remember it. I remember the taste of the water, it wasn't like anything else I've ever—it was dripping down from somewhere, it was dripping on _me_ , and I drank it. And I healed, even though I should have been dead instead, and now there's this thing where I can move stuff with my mind, and I just—I don't know. Maybe I'm, like, turning into something, or—"

"Hey, hey, whoa," Cal said, because probably he could feel the runaway train of Nikko's panic picking up speed just as well as Nikko could. "Hold up a second."

He'd unwound himself—his legs were folded up under him, now. He had his hands out, _slow down_ , and he looked intent and curious and concerned and didn't feel even the least bit mad. If Nikko had known all he had to do to make Cal stop being angry was freak out at him—

Well, no, it probably would still have taken the psychic thing to get him to do it.

"Look, maybe it was the water or maybe it wasn't," Cal said. "Or maybe—maybe it was the Ring of Truth, actually, maybe that piece you found—" He stopped himself and coughed. "Uh, never mind. The point is, it doesn't matter. You're not blue and scaly, you're not breathing fire—and even if you were, that doesn't mean you wouldn't still be _you_. The only way to be a monster is to decide to, and that's not going to happen to you."

He sounded clear, calm, confident; and underneath that he _meant_ it, with a solid comfortable— _faith_ was a weird word, Nikko decided, but it warmed him anyway. "Yeah? How do you know?" Nikko said, and it mostly didn't come out too shaky.

Cal shrugged, suddenly awkward again, a distance opening where there hadn't been one a second ago—Nikko was surprised by how much that bothered him. "Because I know you, man," Cal said, low. "You're a—you're a good guy."

 _Like your mother_ , Nikko remembered, _a good heart_. Which had been pretty weird coming from a homeless stranger, but Cal—Cal was basically the last person Nikko had thought would ever see him like that.

"A good guy who made you think maybe you were losing your mind," Nikko said, "just to keep a stupid secret."

"Yeah, well, I didn't say you were perfect," Cal said wryly. "You're annoying, you're arrogant, you never listen to anybody, you have horrible taste in magazines—"

"Okay, okay, I get the picture," Nikko said, laughing and holding his hands up as though in defense, and he was rewarded with an honest-to-God grin before Cal looked away.

"But we could—we could be friends," Cal concluded, staring out at the bay. "You know, for real. Or something like that."

His voice was low, a little rough; and hearing him say it like that, earnest, right after setting all his own fear aside and being so _kind_ —it made Nikko feel weird and wistful. Embarrassed, too, because 'friends' was fine, 'friends' was good, he didn't really have any reason to turn that down except that he wanted to. He wanted—

Cal cleared his throat and reached up, rubbed his ear jerkily; he still wasn't looking at Nikko. And it had to be too much to hope for, didn't it, that half of this feeling was coming from him? But if, _if_ Cal and Nikko were feeling the same thing, how would Nikko be able to tell?

He'd never especially liked to look when he could leap instead. He reached over and caught Cal's face in his hands before he could even start to talk himself out of it; and Cal stared at him, wide-eyed, and swallowed, and then totally unmistakably looked straight at Nikko's mouth.

_Hah._

Nikko grinned at him, before Cal could freak out again. "Or maybe something more like this," he said, and leaned in.

  


*

  


Nikko was a fantastic kisser, if he did say so himself; but after the first moment when his mouth touched Cal's, he could hardly remember what he did during this one, because the kissing ended up only being about a quarter of what was happening.

He didn't just reach for Cal with his hands, his body—he reached every way he could. The angle wasn't great, but Nikko didn't wait for Cal to move: he just tugged Cal around with the telekinesis until everything fit better, and Cal made a surprised sound into his mouth. Surprised, but not upset—and Nikko knew that because he'd reached out that way, too.

Most of the other times he'd picked up something from Cal, he'd just been sitting there inside himself, waiting. Cal's fear had had to come slap him around the face; and he'd been reaching in the cave, they'd been together there for a second, but then he'd stopped again. After that it had been nothing but bad stuff, Cal's frustration and anger and unhappiness, and Nikko hadn't _wanted_ to reach out for that, had flinched away from it and avoided it.

But now, he made an actual effort. Cal's presence was there, and Nikko had had enough practice at this point that he could almost feel out where its edges were. And he leaned in, in there, and pushed everything toward it: his own frustration with Cal, the cold shock of Middle Management pulling out that knife and how he'd blasted through the other Dorna goons afterward, lying in the cold and the dark feeling like Cal was the only other thing in the world. And farther back, Château Rene and how they'd shouted at each other; the quiet pleasantness of all those shared hotel rooms that Nikko had never quite let himself label _domestic_ ; having Cal's life literally on the line in Antarctica, and Nikko the only one close enough to do anything—

It felt—well, honestly, it felt kind of wildly embarrassing, to just spread all that out for Cal to look at. But he could also feel Cal examining it. Like an artifact, a puzzle—like something that was complicated, valuable, worth Cal's time to understand.

And then, in a rush like a wave, Cal pushed it all back at him, the irritation and the concern and the half-reluctant warmth, the grudging acknowledgment that Nikko wasn't just a spoiled private-school kid but was quick, smart, strong—could keep up with the team and deserved to. A wry self-conscious flash of the line of Nikko's shoulders; and then Nikko's delight bubbled up through it, bringing along a few too many saved-up mental images of Cal's hands.

It was just—it was perfect, it was _easy_. It felt like maybe Nikko and Cal had always been meant to be like this, connected like this; like the only reason they'd struggled so much with each other was because they'd kept trying to use all those clumsy ill-shaped words all the time, instead of just being linked at the brain like they should have been. They had always been so much better together when there was a problem—when they were focused, concentrating on the same thing. When they were of one mind.

Nikko had no idea how long any of it had taken, but he realized dimly that they were barely even kissing anymore—they were just sitting there with their faces pressed together, their mouths touching, totally distracted by the insides of their shared heads.

He couldn't help it, he had to break away and laugh. Cal jumped a little, blinking, and just looked at Nikko for a second; and then he bit his lip.

"Man, your dad's going to _kill_ me."

Nikko made a dismissive face, shifting until his knee was touching Cal's. "I'll get Vincent to talk him down."

Cal grinned at him. And then—thank God, Nikko thought, for the stupid Bridge of Souls—nothing about his face changed, but a slow sick apprehension was welling up from somewhere, and it wasn't Nikko's.

"Cal?"

The grin slid away, and so did Cal's gaze. "If he doesn't want us to—"

"Hey," Nikko said. "I'm not going to let anybody talk me out of this. Uh, except you, I guess," he added, looking down, "if you don't—"

"No, I—" Cal said instantly, and then huffed half a laugh at himself, rubbing at the side of his ear again. "No," he said again. "I'm not going to do that. I just—you really think this'll work?"

Nikko grinned and shrugged. "Hey, it's like Vincent was saying earlier, right? The only way to know is to try."

"And you want to?" Cal said. "Try?"

He didn't sound uncertain, just sort of mildly curious; but there was a roiling discomfort underneath, increasingly nauseating. Jesus, was this how other people felt when they did things they thought were a risk? Nikko might have blown up fewer toilets if he'd gotten this sensation in the pit of his stomach when he did.

His own reflex was always bravado: he gave Cal a deliberate onceover, smirking a little, and said lightly, "I could be convinced."

But no, that was wrong: Cal laughed a little, but the downswing in his mood behind it hadn't reversed its trajectory at all.

"Hey," Nikko said, frowning, and touched Cal's jaw. Which was a stupid romcom kind of thing to do, but it got Cal to meet his eyes again, and that was what mattered.

It was easier like that, quiet, looking at each other. Nikko could concentrate on learning the dim contours of Cal's worry, the shadowy sucking fear that this was just one more thing Nikko didn't really take seriously, that Nikko didn't think it was important—

"Stop," Nikko said, not realizing until he heard himself that he'd said it out loud. "Stop it, don't do that. This is as important to me as—as anything," and he'd think about it as many times as he had to, until Cal believed it: Cal's smug annoying face when he was right and Nikko was wrong. Cal throwing away Nikko's magazines—and the day almost three weeks later when Cal had gotten on the jet, sat down next to Nikko, and thrown the newest issue of _Mad_ at Nikko's head without speaking. Finding Cal's stupid fuzzy socks on the floor every morning when they'd been up in Sweden, Cal's toothpaste by the sink every night in Morocco, the way Cal's eyes crinkled up when he was tired and he laughed—

"Okay, okay," Cal said.

Nikko blinked. Cal was looking at him, but warmly now, eyes bright; and he smiled, and the feeling in him matched it: the sun coming up, everything filling with light.

"Okay," Nikko agreed, beaming, and then raised his eyebrows. "So, think we're on the same page now?"

  


  


* * *

  


  


Dad looked up first when Nikko pushed open the lab door, and almost instantly his face took on predictable lines: the worried crease in the brow, a paternal frown at the corners of the mouth.

He totally knew what Nikko was about to say. So Nikko obligingly said it. "We're ready to try again, Dad."

"Nikko—" Dad said, warningly.

"Are you certain?" Vincent said.

"Yes," Nikko told them both, firm.

He hadn't quite convinced himself to grab Cal's hand on the way in, because that seemed really grade-school and also like a bad way of breaking the news to Dad. But he was holding Cal by the wrist, so low on Cal's arm that the bases of their palms were pressed together, and Cal wasn't shaking him off. Compared to how they'd been before—avoiding each other, glaring, standing on opposite sides of rooms—that alone felt like a freaking neon sign.

And it was a neon sign Vincent had obviously spotted, because he was smiling.

Dad looked at Vincent accusingly; and Vincent looked back at Dad with blithe contentment; and Dad looked back at Nikko, and then at Cal, and this time he had to have noticed _something_ , because his eyes narrowed.

"I don't want 'certain'," Dad said, "I want 'absolutely sure'."

"I'm absolutely sure," Nikko said, and didn't even roll his eyes. "It'll work this time, Dad. I know it will."

Dad stared at him a little longer, assessing, and then to Cal—and he raised his eyebrows, inquiring, wanting confirmation.

Which was totally fair, because Cal possibly in some cases was just a little bit more careful than Nikko, and also made sense, because Cal's head was just as much on the line. But Cal felt startled again, like—what, he thought Dad didn't trust his judgment? That was silly.

Cal flicked a glance at Nikko, mouth quirked, and Nikko realized belatedly that he'd probably heard at least some of that. But the startlement was giving way to a sort of pleased pride, which looked a lot better on Cal than uncertainty.

"Yeah," Cal said to Dad. "It'll work, Solomon."

Despite their assurances, of course, Dad still wanted to be careful; so they sat down on the floor again, just like last time. And the sastun was exactly the same, cool gleaming jade, but everything else couldn't have felt more different: Nikko looked across it at Cal and had to bite his cheek to keep from laughing. Man, today was going to be so awesome. They were going to figure this thing out properly, unlock whatever it had to tell them, and Dad was going to go into fits of joy. And then, if Nikko had his way, he and Cal were going to go upstairs, lock a door, and try for second base at least.

Cal snorted—Jesus, they really were picking up a lot more from each other now that they had things straightened out—and shook his head; but his ears were turning pink.

"Ready?" Nikko said.

"Ready," Cal murmured, and then they set their hands on the stone.

  


*

  


Nikko opened his eyes and blinked twice, and the mass of lines and shapes in front of him turned back into Cal's face—almost unfamiliar, for a second, after being in that inner space again, like that was just some weird clunky mask the real Cal was stuck behind.

But then Cal's eyes opened, too, and never mind: there he was.

Nikko grinned at him, and together they took their hands off the sastun. Which was, Nikko realized, glowing a little bit, a pearly sort of green; but a moment longer and the light faded.

"Well?" Dad said. "What happened?"

"You'll have to ask him," Nikko said, waving a hand at Cal.

Dad frowned. "What? But weren't you both—"

Oh, right, Dad hadn't been there—Dad hadn't seen how it worked. "Sort of? It was—it really does need two people, Dad, it can't work any other way." Nikko stopped and tried to work out how to say it. "It's not like a brain, it's stone—the whole structure is different. The stuff that comes out of it isn't—isn't the right shape, or—" Man, words were just not good enough for this.

"Like a computer," Juliet jumped in. "Almost nobody ever deals with raw machine code. We make operating systems, graphical interfaces, to turn what a computer is really doing into something we're able to understand more easily."

"Right, yeah," Nikko said. "Like that. And I was—it was all just kind of going through me. I wasn't seeing it, I was just how the stone could change it into something Cal would understand." He shook his head. "You can't do both with one brain, it's too much. That's where the heads-exploding part comes in."

"Mmhmm," Dad said, and then he looked at Cal and raised his eyebrows.

Cal was staring down at the sastun—his hand was still kind of hovering over it. And maybe he saw Dad out of the corner of his eye or maybe he could feel Nikko's attention, but either way he swallowed and looked up. "It's—it's all true," he said, eyes wide, and he sounded young, ingenuous, totally awestruck. "It's all—the end of the world, all of it. All the old calendars pointing to the same date, it's real. They knew it was coming. All these ancient civilizations in every different part of the world, every system and prediction and prophecy they could come up with—it all told them the same thing.

"And it's all—everything they made, all these amazing things we've been looking for, they didn't just make them because they could. It's _for us_. That pyramid in Antarctica, and the Sphere of Archimedes, that it can shelter people from cataclysms. The waters of the Tungus, to heal people, and the rituals of Avalon—they're doing it wrong, it's not supposed to kill anybody, it's meant to be done to help keep people safe until it's over. The path to enlightenment on the Wheel of Dharma, to show us how to work together, how to remember ourselves even in the worst of it. The Ring of Truth, all the pieces and their powers.

"It's for us. It's to help us survive it, it's—it's to give us a chance to make it through the end of the world. To turn it into a beginning again."

They all stared at him. It probably should have sounded terrifying; but Dad had chosen them, had brought them together with Veritas, for a reason. Juliet looked alight with wonder, Maggie calm and sure and steady—and Vincent looked downright dangerous, but that was something you wanted, wasn't it, in somebody you'd be going through an apocalypse with? And Dad—

Dad looked stern and brilliant and determined; he looked at the sastun like it had challenged him to something, and Dad never backed down. "Well," he said firmly. "If we're going to save the world, we've got a lot of work to do."

**Author's Note:**

> Sastuns (alternately, zaztuns) are a real thing; they have associations with scrying/divination, especially as used by modern spiritualists, but it's impossible to be certain about their original function. They [are, in fact, commonly recovered on or around pyrite mirrors](https://books.google.com/books?id=MHHmqV7c64oC&pg=PA177&lpg=PA177&dq=sastun+scrying&source=bl&ots=2oxz3u91h2&sig=EYShNBWrqPx3_8gTQwTBbBu4YYs&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CDQQ6AEwBGoVChMIofC-x9vgyAIVQXU-Ch03tw3i#v=onepage&q=sastun%20scrying&f=false). One of the largest ones ever found is ... like 4 cm in diameter, from the [Temple of the Warriors at Chichén Itzá](http://documents.mx/documents/morris-charlot-morris-1931-temple-of-the-warriors-at-chichen-itza-yucatan-volume-1.html) (see pages 186-188 by that book's internal numbering). A man named Juan Olalde [was in fact the head foreman](http://www.mocavo.com/Bulletin-of-the-Pan-American-Union-1928-Volume-62/857392/283) of excavations at Chichén Itzá in 1926, though the existence and content of his journals and the rest of his involvement in this story is totally made up. As far as I know, the [Museo Nacional de Antropología](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museo_Nacional_de_Antropolog%C3%ADa) (i.e., the MNA) has no such material in its archives.


End file.
